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When do governments adopt ambitious climate policy? Charting the theoretical territory between climate change politics and long-term policymaking, this paper highlights the role of electoral competition in shaping how politicians respond to the intertemporal tradeoff of one important climate change mitigation policy: fossil fuel taxation. The more secure the government is in office, the more insulated it is from the vagaries of political competition, and the more likely it is to impose costs on constituents today to generate a future stable climate. By influencing governments' time preferences, competition structures the myopia of elected officials. I test the arguments using an original dataset of gasoline taxation across high-income democracies between 1988 and 2013. I find evidence that higher levels of electoral competition are associated with lower gasoline tax rates, and that the relationship is moderated by the level of costs imposed on voters, but not government partisanship. More generally, the analysis highlights when governments can increase consumer prices to address long-term challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many policy problems require taking costly action today for future benefits. Examining the case of climate change, this paper examines how two institutions—electoral rules and interest group intermediation—structure the distributional politics of climate change and as a result, drive variation in climate "policy investments" across the high-income democracies. Proportional electoral rules increase electoral safety, allowing politicians to impose short-term costs on voters. Concertation between industry and the state enables governments to compensate losers, defusing organized opposition to policy change. Moreover, the joint presence of both institutions generates complementarities that reinforce their independent effects, pushing countries onto different climate politics trajectories. Newly available data on climate policy stringency provide empirical support for the arguments. Countries with PR and interest group concertation have the highest levels of policy stringency and distribute higher costs toward consumers. The analysis points to causal mechanisms that should structure policy responses to a more general set of long-term challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the recognition of the seriousness of climate change and other forms of environmental challenges, a growing number of political scientists are working in the environmental area. We have a substantial body of research examining local, regional, and global environmental issues. It is our sense that time is ripe for the field of international and comparative environmental politics to reflect on existing work, integrate it, and clearly articulate directions for future research. This special issue seeks to encourage scholars to systemically examine the roles of domestic and international factors, either alone or in interaction, to develop more nuanced models of environmental politics across space and time. We hope that the papers here will help to define the research frontier for the environmental politics field. Collectively, they exemplify recent efforts in comparative and international environmental politics that are, first, explanatory in orientation; second, cross levels of analysis in a way that transcends artificial subdisciplinary distinctions; and finally, are based on application of a variety of research methods and modeling techniques standard among the wider political science community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is widely believed that international cooperation can arise through strategies of reciprocity. In this paper, we investigate whether citizens in the United States and 25 other countries support reciprocity to deal with climate change. We find little public enthusiasm for intrinsic reciprocity, in which countries restrain their consumption of fossil fuels if and only if other countries do the same. In contrast, we find significant support for extrinsic reciprocity, in which countries enforce cooperation by linking issues. Citizens support economic sanctions against polluters and are willing to shame them in international forums, especially when the polluters are violating a treaty. Cooperation could, therefore, emerge from efforts to link climate with other issues and to embed climate commitments in international law. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Greenhouse gas emissions trading (ET) systems have become the centerpiece of climate change policy at multiple scales, unexpectedly largely outside of the UN climate governance process. The diffusion of ET is best described as a case of polycentric diffusion, where ET systems diffused to multiple loci of governance, but where they all serve similar goals under a broad policy framework guided loosely by the UN-based climate regime. Using network analysis combined with qualitative data, we explain how this polycentric pattern of policy development emerged, who carried and spread it and how, and how the idea has spread into a polycentric governance system. We contribute to the policy diffusion literature in a novel way to explain diffusion toward polycentric governance, show the limits of the existing literature to explain the diffusion of ET, and show the utility of network analysis in understanding the process and mechanism of polycentric diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Debates about how to respond to climate change have largely focused on the difficulties in agreeing on national targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. By assuming that the main obstacle to emissions reduction lies in the inability to reach agreement internationally, the current debate underplays the challenges of building the state capacity that will be needed to ensure mitigation takes place. The implementation of mitigation strategies is far from straightforward. It requires careful balancing of competing priorities and deliberate strategies to bring different interest groups on board. We analyze the way this balancing act has been carried out in promoting energy efficiency measures in China and India. The balancing act has been done differently as each country has tailored its approach to the specific context of competing priorities and differing state capacity. We encapsulate these differences by referring to China’s approach as “state-signaling” and India’s approach as a “market-plus” approach. China’s approach is more explicitly statist than India’s, but in both countries, the state plays a central role in building the support base for its policies through processes that we describe as the bundling of policies and interests. These bundling strategies are used to help build informal coalitions in favor of energy efficiency measures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]