Powerful political actors in the international system quite frequently adopt unilateral policies whose implications extend beyond their respective borders. Examples include financial market regulation as well as taxation, trade and environmental policies. They do so to avoid lowest...

Most governments emphasize the need for reciprocal (“give and take”) international commitments in global climate policy. Nonetheless, existing public opinion polls indicate strong support by individual citizens for unilateral climate policies as well. This raises the question of whether...

Energy system transitions in democracies require that national interests and central planning are reconciled with the public's preferences. This pilot study investigates public support for the Swiss national energy strategy and two specific technologies that are part of it: expansion of...

While global trade talks have been making very little progress in recent years, the number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) has grown rapidly, and many of these institutions are reaching much deeper into the domestic political arena than traditional multilateral trade liberalization....

The dominant explanation of public attitudes vis-à-vis economic globalisation focuses on re-distributional implications, with an emphasis on factor endowments and government-sponsored safety nets (the compensation hypothesis). The empirical implication of these theoretical arguments is that in...