Several studies examining implications of the modern welfare state arrive at rather positive conclusions: generally, they find that economically “kinder, gentler societies”, that is, countries providing stronger state-sponsored social-safety nets for their people, perform better on various...

Many advanced industrialized countries have, in recent years, experienced a significant expansion of electricity production from renewables. Yet we know quite little about the dynamics of the underlying policy choices in this area. Using new data on adoptions and changes in feed-in tariff and...

A recent Climatic Change review article reports a remarkable convergence of scientific evidence for a link between climatic events and violent intergroup conflict, thus departing markedly from other contemporary assessments of the empirical literature. This commentary revisits the review in...

What factors determine firms' attitudes toward trade policy? This paper considers producers' policy preferences and political behavior in light of two key patterns in modern international trade: industries that face import competition often have many exporters, and foreign sales are concentrated...

A fundamental policy design choice in government-led climate change mitigation is: what role should flexibility mechanisms like carbon offsetting play in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Since public opinion affects the policy choices of government, we investigate how arguments regarding...

Governments need the support of their citizens in order to be able to adopt and implement ambitious environmental protection policies. Recent research on liberal democratic systems has found evidence that increased civil society organization involvement can help increase the popular legitimacy...

The traditional political economy account of global climate change governance directs our attention to fundamental collective action problems associated with global public goods provision, resulting from positive or negative externalities as well as freeriding. The governance architecture of the...

Recent research suggests that there is substantial public support (including willingness to pay) for forest conservation. Based on a nationwide survey experiment in Brazil (N = 2500) the largest and richest of the world's tropical developing countries, we shed new light on this issue. To what...

A survey-embedded experiment implemented around the time of the 2014 annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (N ≈ 1200) examined whether such summits are able to increase citizens' awareness of climate problems. This study finds that...

To what extent citizens are willing not only to support ambitious climate policy but also willing to pay for such policy remains subject to debate. Our analysis addresses three issues in this regard: whether, as is widely assumed but not empirically established, willingness to support (WTS) is...