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The article focuses on two important topics of political discussions including policy framing and the U.S. Energy Security which was discussed at Annual Convention for the American Political Science Association held on September 1-4, 2011 at Seattle, Washington. It mentions positive and negative impacts of energy security under popular and political perceptions.

Energy policy in the United States has seen periods of popularity and periods of neglect. After the energy crises in the 1970s, particular strains of concern and their respective policy prescriptions emerged among political science and energy scholars. Unfortunately, these concerns and prescriptions were not heard and implemented by policymakers. Nor were they heeded years later when, likely as a result, energy issues reemerged in the 1990s and again at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Each time, the crises (actual or perceived) were intimately related to conditions abroad drawing a clear link between domestic energy supply and US foreign policy. This paper builds upon years of commentary criticizing political leaders for not heeding past recommendations, looking specifically at the role of Congress. The paper analyzes the content of congressional hearings on the topic of energy security (2000 to 2002) to determine what policy options were or were not debated and how far we were from implementing more "effective" energy security policies. Preliminary results suggest that discussions were generally on the right track, but failed to adequately consider domestic efforts to increase energy efficiency and reduce energy consumption and intensity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does news coverage of environmental issues shape U.S. environmental foreign policy? Our theory is that the influence of news coverage on environmental policy depends on whether or not the news coverage of the particular environmental issue is tied to an actual event. By themselves, environmental issues tend to be abstract and are therefore less likely to promote the level of public concern that would force policy makers to make the issue a top priority. However, when environmental problems like global warming are connected to major news events, like hurricanes, heat waves and droughts, they gain the salience necessary to raise public concern about the issue which in turn encourages and often pressures the government to address the problem. To test this hypothesis, this study includes a time series analysis of the relationship between television news coverage of global warming both with and without connection to extreme weather events, public opinion about global warming and government attention to this problem. Here we consider both attention, in the form of congressional hearings on pertinent environmental issues, and action, in this case, government funding of research on environmental issues. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of foreign policy analysis have been rigorously tested against a multitude of cases, though the most prevalent are high politics issues and crisis situations. Existing literature would benefit from expanded tests against a different class of cas ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question this paper addresses is whether and, if so, to what extent can existing IR theories of high politics decision making be applied to low politics issue areas, specifically international environmental policy. The paper considers three individual level theories: Prospect Theory, Political and Policy Risk Theory and Poliheuristic Theory. Each is applied to two case studies, The Montreal Protocol and The Kyoto Protocol, to test its ability to explain the decision-making processes of United States presidents. The climate change case study is most illustrative, either for or against the applicability of a theory, as the risks presidents faced were greater. The paper concludes that none of the applications lend full support to any of the theories. At the same time, none of them completely invalidate the theories either. Of the three, Political and Policy Risk Theory shows the most promise, while the analysis of Prospect Theory reveals some weaknesses in its applicability and the results of the application of Poliheuristic Theory fall somewhere in between. The findings suggest that foreign policy analysis theories may be best able to explain international environmental policy choices if they can capture the complexity of the issue, better define risk and allow for more human agency in terms of personal preferences and belief systems. In general, the applications to environmental policy suggest that the three theories could be adjusted or amended to become better generalizable to different policy areas. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]