Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

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 common-denominator outcomes in areas where they desire more ambitious international policies, and to motivate or coerce other countries to shoulder a part of the burden associated with problem solving. This article explores whether and how such unilateralism affects public opinion in other countries, arguing that such analysis can point to external constraints on unilateralism and is worthwhile also for normative reasons. Empirically, we examine the effect of a major unilateral European Union (EU) climate policy initiative, which regulates emissions from aircraft, on public opinion in India and the United States, the two largest democracies outside the EU. Based on survey experiments, we study the effects of cost and sovereignty considerations on people’s evaluation of the EU’s new policy. The results show that both types of concern play a significant role and may act as a constraint on unilateral European climate policy.

Keywords

Climate change emission trading public opinion survey experiment unilateralism

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Amazon Mechanical Turk (2012) Amazon Mechanical Turk. Available at: http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome (accessed 7 June 2013).

Barrett

(2006) Environment and Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty-making, New York, USA: Oxford University Press.

Berinsky

Huber

Lenz

(2012) Evaluating online labor markets for experimental research: Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. Political Analysis 20(3): 351–368.

Bernauer

(2013) Climate change politics. Annual Review of Political Science 16(May): 421–448.

Bernauer

Caduff

(2004) In whose interest? Pressure group politics, economic competition and environmental regulation. Journal of Public Policy 24(1): 99–126.

Christin

Trechsel

(2002) Joining the EU? Explaining public opinion in Switzerland. European Union Politics 3(4): 415–443.

Downs

(1957) An economic theory of political action in a democracy. The Journal of Political Economy 65(2): 135–150.

Druckman

Green

Kuklinski

(2011) Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Druckman

Kam

(2011) Students as experimental participants: A defense of the ‘Narrow Data Base’. In: Druckman

Green

Kuklinski

Lupia

(eds) Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10.

European Environment Agency (2012) Climate change. Available at: http://www/eea/europa.eu/themes/climate (accessed 16 January 2013).

11.

Gilardi

(2010) Who learns from what in policy diffusion processes? American Journal of Political Science 54(3): 650–666.

12.

Hooghe

Marks

(2004) Does identity or economic rationality drive public opinion on European integration? Political Science and Politics 37(3): 415–420.

13.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1999) Special report aviation and the global atmosphere. Available at: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/aviation/index.php?idp=3 (accessed 7 June 2013).

14.

Krause

(2010) Policy innovation, intergovernmental relations, and the adoption of climate protection initiatives by US cities. Journal of Urban Affairs 33(1): 45–60.

15.

Krosnick

MacInnis

(2012) Trends between 2008 and 2010 in American public opinion regarding whether the U.S. should take unilateral action on climate change. Working paper.

16.

Landis

Bernauer

(2012) Transfer payments in global climate policy. Nature Climate Change 2(August): 628–633.

17.

Leggett

Elias

Shedd

(2012) Aviation and the European Union's emissiontrading scheme. Report, Service TUSCR, USA.

18.

Mason

Suri

(2012) Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Behavior Research Methods 44(1): 1–23.

19.

Mutz

(2011) Population-based Survey Experiments, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

20.

The New York Times (2013) In Europe, paid permits for pollution are fizzling. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/22/business/energy-environment/europes-carbon-market-is-sputtering-as-prices-dive.html?pagewanted=1 (accessed 4 June 2013).

21.

Peters GP, Minx JC, Weber CL, et al. (2011) Growth in emission transfers via international trade from 1990 to 2008. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(21): 8903--8908.

22.

Reuters (2013) Noble prize winners urge Obama to back carbon pricing. Available at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/14/us-nobel-obama-carbon-idUSBRE92D0ZF20130314 (accessed 4 June 2013).

23.

Ross J, Irani L, Silberman M, et al. (2010) Who are the crowdworkers?: Shifting demographics in mechanical Turk. Proceedings of the 28th of the international conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, pp. 2863--2872.

24.

Sandler

(2004) Global Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

25.

Schaffer

(2011) Voluntary climate change initiatives in the U.S.: Analyzing participation in space and time. PhD Thesis, ETH Zürich, Switzerland.

26.

Schreurs

Tiberghien

(2007) Multi-level reinforcement: Explaining European Union leadership in climate change mitigation. Global Environmental Politics 7(4): 19–46.

27.

Scruggs

Benegal

(2012) Declining public concern about climate change: Can we blame the great recession? Global Environmental Change 22(2): 505–515.

28.

Tingley D and Tomz M (2012) Conditional cooperation and climate change. Available at: http://www.stanford.edu/∼tomz/working/working.shtml (accessed 7 June 2013).

29.

Tjernström

Tietenberg

(2008) Do differences in attitudes explain differences in national climate change policies? Ecological Economics 65(2): 315–324.

30.

Unipark (2012) Unipark-online survey software for universities. Available at: http://www.unipark.com (accessed 7 June 2013).

31.

Urpelainen

(2009) Explaining the Schwarzenegger phenomenon: Local frontrunners in climate policy. Global Environmental Politics 9(3): 82–105.

32.

Victor

(2011) Global Warming Gridlock: Creating more Effective Strategies for Protecting the Planet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

33.

Vogel

(1995) Trading up. Consumer and Environmental Regulation in a Global Economy, Cambridge, USA: First Harvard University Press.

34.

Ward

Cao

(2012) Domestic and international influences on green taxation. Comparative Political Studies 45: 1075–1103.

35.

World Bank (2010) Public attitudes toward climate change: findings from a multi-country poll. Available at: http://climatechange.worldbank.org/node/5322 (accessed 7 June 2013).

36.

World Resources Institute (2012) Climate analysis indicators tools. Available at: http://www.wri.org/tools/cait (accessed 7 June 2013).

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.12 MB

0.00 MB

0.45 MB

European unilateralism and involuntary burden-sharing in global climate politics: A public opinion perspective from the other side

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References

Supplementary Material