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To achieve its ambitious climate targets, the European Union (EU) must adopt new policies, increase the impact of existing policies and/or remove dysfunctional ones. The EU has developed an elaborate system to monitor national policy mixes in order to support these challenging requirements. Data that member states have reported to the EU over the last ten years reveal that the average expected per-policy-instrument emission reduction has declined, while national policy mixes have remained generally stable over time. This is strikingly discordant with the EU’s ambitious commitment to become carbon neutral by 2050 (‘net zero’).

This special issue analyzes the evolving notion of Sino–Japanese rivalry and its effects on concrete foreign policy measures of both states in a global context. China’s emergence as a great power a...

Ever since the so-called rise of China has started, Sino-Japanese relations have been increasingly described as a rivalry between both states. For the most part, this assumed rivalry has be...

Protection against social risks is generally popular among voters and should enjoy the benefits of institutional inertia. Yet retrenchment occurs rather frequently in advanced welfare states without this systematically leading to electoral punishment. We solve this paradox by, first, arguing that governments can avoid the blame of retrenchment by pursuing a strategy of ‘expansionary dismantling’ where new policies and instruments are used to compensate reform losers and to obfuscate cutbacks. Second, we test our argument with a huge new dataset consisting of changes in unemployment legislation and replacement rates in 18 OECD countries from 1976 to 2000. The statistical tests provide robust support for our argument, suggesting that the introduction of new policies and instruments leads to cutbacks in replacement rates. We also find that left-leaning governments are least likely to engage in expansionary dismantling.

The advancing internationalisation of environmental politics has triggered increasing interest in factors that lead countries to participate in international environmental agreements. But do partisan differences matter for such ratification decisions? An analysis of the ratification responses of 21 OECD countries toward 64 treaties shows that partisan environmentalism matters for ratification behaviour whereas left–right differences do not play a significant role. More precisely, while the likelihood of ratification increases when overall government positions are more pro-environment, pro-environment veto players and environmental ministers are not found to play a role. These results hold against a number of controls and correcting for potential error in the measurement of party positions.