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Policy responses able to combat the continuing increase in global greenhouse gas emissions remain challenging amid cost-averse voters and uncertainty about the redistributive effects of climate action. Political reforms in European Union member states may further be complicated by its multi-level system in which policymaking can occur at the national or the supranational level. We investigate how the level of policymaking affect voters’ climate spending preferences and public approval of redistributive policy instruments. We devise a series of randomized experiments embedded in a survey administered to over 21,000 respondents in 17 European countries. We investigate the impact of policy design on mass preferences regarding three related issues: whether carbon tax revenues should be invested in climate technology or returned as direct payments (1), the extent to which climate technology investments should focus on mitigation or adaptation (2), and which fairness principles should guide the disbursement of direct payments (3). The results speak to research on how institutional context may complicate or facilitate progressive climate action and its importance relative to concerns about distributive fairness.

We explore the conditions under which individuals are willing to assist foreign countries in response to natural disasters. Our interest is in which fairness-related and political considerations drive mass preferences over the allocation of international disaster relief. Further, how do the characteristics of recipient countries influence citizens’ willingness to provide relief aid after a natural disaster? Additionally, we study how information about the future occurrence of natural disasters affects mass support for investing in disaster preparedness as opposed to providing disaster relief. We employ experiments embedded in nationally representative surveys in the US and the UK to empirically study these questions. Our project is meant to improve our understanding of the factors influencing public support for international disaster relief, the extent to which the structure of these preferences aligns with actual allocation decisions by political elites, and the drivers of mass support for domestic preparedness investment. We add the survey instrument that provides details about our experimental items and question wording below.

A large literature argues that public opinion is vulnerable to various types of framing and cue effects. However, we lack evidence on whether existing findings, which are typically based on lab experiments involving low salience issues, travel to salient and contentious political issues in real-world voting situations. We examine the relative importance of issue frames, partisan cues, and their interaction for opinion formation using a survey experiment conducted around a highly politicized referendum on immigration policy in Switzerland. We find that voters responded to frames and cues, regardless of their direction, by increasing support for the position that is in line with their pre-existing partisan attachment. This reinforcement effect was most visible among low knowledge voters that identified with the party that owned the issue. These results support some of the previous findings in the political communication literature, but at the same time also point toward possible limits to framing effects in the context of salient and contested policy issues.

Wie wichtig sind Wahlen und die Parteizugehörigkeit von Regierungen für die Entwicklung des Aktienmarktes? Um diese Frage zu beantworten, liefert der vorliegende Beitrag eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme zur Wirkung von Politik auf Aktienmärkte. Nach einer kurzen Skizzierung jener beiden polit-ökonomischen Grundmodelle, die die Forschung zum Zusammenhang zwischen Politik und Aktienmarkt inspiriert haben, werden die Befunde empirischer Studien zu Wahlzyklus- und Parteieffekten vorgestellt und kritisch beleuchtet. Dabei wird insbesondere herausgearbeitet, warum die klassischen, vor dem Hintergrund des amerikanischen politischen Systems entwickelten polit-ökonomischen Modelle nicht ohne Weiteres auf andere Länder übertragbar sind und welche potenzielle Bedeutung institutionelle Charakteristika für den Einfluss von Politik auf Aktienmärkte haben. Der Aufsatz schließt mit einer Zusammenfassung und einigen Anmerkungen für weitere Forschungsanstrengungen., Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, Bd. 38 Nr. 2 (2009): Offenes Heft

National governments have intensified their attempts to create international institutions in various policy fields such as environment, finance, and trade. At the same time, many subnational policymakers have begun to duplicate international efforts by setting their own, stricter policies while others remain inactive or enact more lax regulation. This "glocalization" of policy creates a complex and economically costly patchwork system of regulations. To shed light on this phenomenon we analyze the interaction between subnational and national governments within a general model of international treaty negotiations. The glocalization of regulatory policy can be understood as an attempt by subnational policymakers to strategically constrain or empower national governments in international negotiations. We find that the shadow of international treaty formation gives rise to within-country and cross-country policy balancing dynamics that may explain some of the subnational policy polarization currently observable in many countries. We specify the conditions under which they occur, spell out empirically testable hypotheses, and identify possible theoretical extensions.