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International climate negotiations occur against the backdrop of increasing collective risk: the likelihood of catastrophic economic loss due to climate change will continue to increase unless and until global mitigation efforts are sufficient to prevent it. We introduce a novel alternating-offers bargaining model that incorporates this characteristic feature of climate change. We test the model using an incentivized experiment. We manipulate two important distributional equity principles: capacity to pay for mitigation of climate change and vulnerability to its potentially catastrophic effects. Our results show that less vulnerable parties do not exploit the greater vulnerability of their bargaining partners. They are, rather, more generous. Conversely, parties with greater capacity are less generous in their offers. Both collective risk itself and its importance in light of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report make it all the more urgent to better understand this crucial strategic feature of climate change bargaining.

Behavioral economics is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that incorporates insights from psychology to enrich standard economic models that assume perfectly rational individuals. Empirical research in behavioral economics typically employs incentivized experiments that use economic games with real money on the line. In these experiments, subjects are awarded financial payoffs based on the decisions they make (either individually or as part of a group) in an institutional context designed by the researcher. Behavioral economics is well suited for political science because behavioral economics is interdisciplinary by nature and political science is not bound by any particular research paradigm. At the same time, the method is still novel to many political scientists despite many years of its use to study political topics in a variety of research areas. What unites the application of the method to these areas is the explicit consideration of conflict. For instance, scholars have uncovered social conflict between groups (e.g., voter polarization in the United States) using behavioral games as measures, or they have designed experiments around elections to test theories of candidate and voter behavior. Because of the clear financial incentives, economic experiments are especially useful for studying people’s actual preferences in areas such as redistribution as opposed to their stated preferences. Finally, the method can be used to design institutions that will help overcome conflict over scarce resources. In sum, the strengths of behavioral economics include: (a) the ability to vary institutional contexts; (b) clear incentives that ensure valid measures of preferences; (c) direct measures of behaviors instead of stated intentions which could be confounded by outside pressures such as social desirability.

Research commonly finds that citizens are loss averse: they dislike losses far more than similarly sized gains. One implication is that arguments for policy change framed in terms of losses to be avoided often have a larger impact on public opinion than arguments framed in terms of gains to be enjoyed. Although several scholars have observed this pattern with respect to public opinion, we know far less about the effect of loss- and gain-framed arguments on political activism. This is a critical omission given the disproportionate impact of political activists on the policymaking process. Using field and survey experiments, we investigate the impact of gain- and loss-framed arguments on climate change activism. We find that loss-framed arguments can be less mobilizing, even when they are otherwise more persuasive, than gain-framed arguments. Our results deepen our theoretical understanding of what motivates political activism, especially in an era of professionalized politics.

Do people judge some forms of wage discrimination to be more unfair than others? We report an experiment in an online labor market in which participants were paid based on discriminatory rules. We test hypotheses about fairness based on procedural justice, divisiveness, and affective polarization between partisans. Workers transcribed text and then learned that they earned more or less money than other workers for doing the same job. We manipulated whether the unequal pay was based on their political party, eye color, or an arbitrary choice between two doors. Consistent with the divisiveness hypothesis, participants judged discriminatory pay to be less fair when it was based on a stable characteristic, political party, or eye color, compared to a transient choice (between doors). We find mixed evidence about how affective polarization exacerbates the unfairness of partisan discrimination. We discuss implications for the procedural justice of wage discrimination.

Some technologies, such as solar or wind power, create certain but relatively small reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Others, such as carbon sequestration devices, have larger potential upsides, but a greater possibility of failure. Here we show using economic games that people will invest in high-risk high-reward technologies when more certain options will not be sufficient. Groups of players had to contribute enough to avoid a simulated climate change disaster. Players could defect, make a certain contribution or make a risky contribution with a high potential gain. Across four studies using both laboratory (n = 296 and n = 297) and online (n = 501 and n = 499) samples, we found that more players made riskier contributions when necessary targets could not be met otherwise, regardless of the magnitude of potential losses. These results suggest that individuals are willing to invest in risky technology when it is necessary to mitigate climate change. In economic games, players shift to riskier contributions when targets that prevent catastrophic losses cannot be met otherwise, suggesting people are willing to invest in riskier technology when more certain options will not be sufficient to mitigate climate change.

Climate change is a global social dilemma. Mitigating it is partly a political problem created by inequitable distributions of the benefits of carbon emissions and the costs of climate change; that is, the people who benefit the most are not the same set of people who pay the most costs. Here we use an experimental economic approach to political science to study these inequities. In two experiments, we show that people willingly create climate problems when those problems are passed along to others. Surprisingly, this is not further exacerbated if those others are from another country. We also show that, with increasing relative losses from climate change, people are more likely to contribute to its mitigation. Thus, we identify a factor that makes preventing climate change difficult and a factor that may lead citizens to contribute to mitigation.

We investigate the effect of personality on prosocial behavior in a Bayesian multilevel meta-analysis (MLMA) of 15 published, interdisciplinary experimental studies. With data from the 15 studies constituting nearly 2500 individual observations, we find that the Big Five traits of Agreeableness and Openness are significantly and positively associated with prosocial behavior, while none of the other three traits are. These results are robust to a number of different model specifications and operationalizations of prosociality, and they greatly clarify the contradictory findings in the literature on the relationship between personality and prosocial behavior. Though previous research has indicated that incentivized experiments result in reduced prosocial behavior, we find no evidence that monetary incentivization of participants affects prosocial tendencies. By leveraging individual observations from multiple studies and explicitly modeling the multilevel structure of the data, MLMA permits the simultaneous estimation of study- and individual-level effects. The Bayesian approach allows us to estimate study-level effects in an unbiased and efficient manner, even with a relatively small number of studies. We conclude by discussing the limitations of our study and the advantages and disadvantages of the MLMA method.

Many scholars study when climate change communication increases citizen engagement. Yet, past work has largely used public opinion-based measures of engagement to evaluate alternative frames. In this paper, we argue for a new approach to evaluation, which is premised on research on the policy-making process showing that space on the political agenda and, ultimately, policy change are more likely to arise in response to changes in both public opinion and collective political action. Thus, we argue that alternative frames should be evaluated based on their consequences for both. This is especially critical given that frames can have divergent effects on attitudes and behavior. Using a combination of field and survey experiments, we apply our approach to evaluate two frames related to climate change risks. We find that they heighten people’s concern about climate change yet decrease their rate of political action to express that concern. Our results suggest caution with regard to these frames in particular and that, more generally, frames that might seem advantageous when examining public opinion may not be when political behavior is analyzed.

Climate migration involves complex interactions of environmental, social, political and economic factors. New research suggests that although wealthy global citizens try to prevent climate migration, they are willing to shoulder a greater share of the climate mitigation burden when extreme climate events hit poor countries.

De Dreu and Gross's distinction between attack and defense is complicated in real-world conflicts because competing leaders construe their position as one of defense, and power imbalances place status quo challengers in a defensive position. Their account of defense as vigilant avoidance is incomplete because it avoids a reference to anger which transforms anxious avoidance into collective and unified action.

Empirical evidence suggests that non-participation underlies a variety of social dilemmas. In collective risk social dilemmas (CRSD), non-participation is viewed as strategic defection—a selfish behavior that increases individual utility at the cost of the group. We conducted a hybrid laboratory-then-online experiment to examine if non-participation in a CRSD may be fundamentally different from the act of strategic defection. We confirmed that non-participation is a problem in a social dilemma. When participation is required, a randomly formed group of subjects was virtually certain to reach the loss prevention threshold (0.999 probability). On the other hand, when an empirically realistic non-participation option was introduced, the probability of reaching the goal by a randomly formed group decreased to 0.599. We also found evidence that the profile of a typical non-participant does not fit the profile of a strategic defector. Non-participants in the experiment were highly cooperative when they had to make a contribution decision. Non-participants in the experiment did not try to increase their payoffs, including in the treatment condition when non-participation led to a default contribution of 100% of the subject’s endowment.

This study assesses whether polling discrepancies for black candidates can be explained by an interaction of racial salience in an election and the candidate’s electoral strength. We hypothesize that voters will have few nonracial justifications for their lack of support for a black candidate when race is a salient issue and the candidate is electorally viable. As a result, polls will experience more problems with socially desirable response bias in such contexts. We use pre-election polls for the near-complete universe of black US Senate and gubernatorial candidates from 1982 to 2010, statewide polls from the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, and an original measure of the racialization to test our hypothesis. Our results demonstrate that the racialization of the election leads polls to significantly overestimate only support for state-level black candidates and President Obama in contexts where the candidate has the most electoral strength. In the conclusion, we discuss how the results inform pollsters about potential hazards for social desirability response bias

A characteristic feature of the global climate change dilemma is interdependence between the underlying economic development that drives anthropogenic climate change-typically modelled as a common pool resource dilemma1,2-and the subsequent dilemma arising from the need to mitigate the negative effects of climate change, often modelled as a public goods dilemma3,4. In other words, in a carbon-based economy, causal responsibility for climate change is a byproduct of economic development, and is therefore endogenous to it. To capture this endogeneity, we combine these two dilemmas into a 'compound climate dilemma' and conduct a series of incentivized experiments in the United States and China to test its implications for cooperation and prosocial behaviour. Here we show that, in a differentiated development condition, even while the advantaged parties increase their prosociality relative to an endogenous but homogeneous baseline condition, the accompanying decrease in cooperative behaviour by the disadvantaged parties more than offsets it. Furthermore, compared with exogenous but identically parameterized control conditions, this endogeneity decreases cooperation in the mitigation dilemma. In light of this interdependence, the basis upon which mitigation obligations should be differentiated becomes an additional dimension of conflict, with implications for domestic politics and international negotiations discussed5,6.

The distributive justice norm of " just deserts " — i.e. the notion that one gets what one deserves — is an essential norm in a market society, and honesty is an important factor in economic and social exchange. We experimentally investigate the effect of violations of the distributive justice norm of " just deserts " on honesty in a setting where behaving dishonestly entails income redistribution. We find that the violation of the just deserts norm results in a greater propensity toward dishonesty. We then test a more general proposition that violations of just deserts induce dishonesty, even in cases where dishonesty does not have redistributive consequences. Our results confirm this proposition but only for cases in which the v iolation of just deserts also entails income inequality. Abstract The distributive justice norm of " just deserts " —i.e. the notion that one gets what

We develop several results related to equilibrium in sophisticated voting under an amendment agenda procedure and supermajoritarian voting rules. Contrary to the simple majority case, we demonstrate that attainable equilibria are a function of the location of the status quo ex ante as well as the tie-breaking rule in place. Most importantly, we demonstrate that the Banks set (the set of sophisticated voting outcomes) does not reduce to the core under certain conditions. Moreover, in generalizing and extending the results in Colomer (1999), we define three analytically distinct regions, defined by the location of the status quo alternative, which determine the extent of the intersection between the Banks set and the core.

Past work finds that material self-interest often motivates increased issue engagement. In this paper we identify an important condition under which the opposite can occur. When people see an issue as threatening to harm material well-being, and they are already facing related resource constraints in their own lives, then they become more concerned about the issue yet less willing to spend scarce resources on issue activism. We demonstrate this point by showing that, among people facing recent health hardships, framing climate change in terms of how it will harm health (a key resource for political participation) is persuasive yet demobilizing. These results advance our theoretical understanding of political participation by showing how people's subjective perceptions of their resources are context dependent. They also show how the motivational influence of material self-interest can have divergent effects on public opinion versus political participation.

We offer a new measure of the ideologically cognizable number of political parties/party groupings that is intended to be complementary to the standard approach to counting the effective number of political parties – the Laakso–Taagepera index (1979). This approach allows the possibility of precise measurement of concepts such as polarized pluralism or fragmented bipolarism and is applicable to both unidimensional and multidimensional representations of party locations. Using recent CSES (Comparative Study of Electoral Systems) data on one-dimensional representations of party locations in four real-world examples (two of which are available in an online appendix), we find that Slovenia, treated initially as a five-party system, has its optimal reduction as a two-bloc/party system, as does Spain, which is treated initially as a four-party system. However, Canada, treated initially as a four-party system, has its optimal reduction as a three-bloc/party system if we look at a unidimensional representation of the party space, while it remains a four-bloc system if we draw on Johnston’s two-dimensional characterization of Canadian political competition. Finally, the Czech Republic, initially a five-party system, is optimally reduced to a system with four party groupings.

Although there is a large literature on the predictive accuracy of pre-election polls, there is virtually no systematic research examining the role that a candidate’s gender plays in polling accuracy. This is a surprising omission given the precipitous growth of female candidates in recent years. Looking at Senate and Gubernatorial candidates from 1989 to 2008 (more than 200 elections in over 40 states), we analyze the accuracy of pre-election polls for almost the complete universe of female candidates and a matched sample of white male cases. We demonstrate that pre-election polls consistently underestimate support for female candidates when compared to white male candidates. Furthermore, our results indicate that this phenomenon—which we dub the Richards Effect, after Ann Richards of Texas—is more common in states which exhibit traits associated with culturally conservative views of gender issues.

Despite its conceptual centrality to research in comparative politics and the fact that a single measure—the Laakso-Taagepera index (LT)—is nearly universally employed in empirical research, the question of what is the best way to “count” parties is still an open one. Among other alleged shortcomings, LT has been criticized for over-weighting small parties, especially in the case of a one-party majority. Using seat-shares data from over 300 elections, I have calculated LT as well as an alternative measure (BZ) which employs normalized Banzhaf scores rather than simple party seat shares, as weights. The Banzhaf index is a voting power index which calculates a party’s voting power as a function of its coalitional potential. Though the two measures are highly correlated, I identify three particular party constellations in which the differences between LT and BZ are systematic and statistically significant. In all of these cases, and especially in the case of a one-party majority, I argue that BZ is a more accurate representation of the actual party system, after any given election, while LT is perhaps better interpreted as a measure of the shape of the party system more generally. These findings have many implications, including with respect to the categorization of party systems and the empirical validity of Duverger’s Law.

The recent Paris agreement has increased optimism that climate change might be successfully mitigated through international agreement. However, the commitments of countries are unenforceable. Therefore domestic political will, including on the part of citizens to make regular sacrifices, will be required in order for countries to meet these commitments. Understanding prosocial behavior in climate change mitigation is thus more important than ever. Many behavioral studies model the mitigation dilemma using public goods games: But, because wealth creation in a carbon-based economy inevitably leads to the appropriation of the global climate commons, climate change and its mitigation actually constitute a dual, interdependent social dilemma. Acknowledging the interdependence of this dilemma is necessary to capture "common but differentiated responsibilities,'' the equity principle that underlies international climate negotiations. To do so, we introduce the compound climate dilemma: a new behavioral game that expands the public goods approach to the mitigation dilemma by combining it with a preceding common pool dilemma. To explore the implications of the compound climate dilemma for prosocial behavior, we conduct experiments in the United States and China, the world's two largest emitters of carbon. Though the pattern of prosocial behavior is virtually identical across the two countries, the introduction of differentiated responsibilities nonetheless has a deleterious effect on successful mitigation.

This paper contributes to the corruption literature by implementing bribery in the laboratory as a dynamic three person sequential game with a focus on social inefficiency and citizen response. In contrast to the design of Abbink (2002) and Cameron et al (2006), our design holds bribe-bargaining mechanisms constant while allowing citizen punishment to vary. Subjects are placed into roles of the firm, government official and citizen respectively, with the firm as first mover initiating the bribe, the official is given the choice of accepting or rejecting, and finally the citizen is able to punish either of the two other players. The experiment consists of two treatments, one with citizen punishment and one without. Experimental sessions were conducted at the University of Texas at Dallas in early Spring 2008, and at the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi, Pakistan, in early Fall 2008. The laboratory environment serves as a useful tool in studying the nature of bribery, and significantly improves upon the aggregate level survey data on corruption perceptions commonly used in corruption analysis. This bribery game allows us to study the number of bribes sent and accepted across cultures, as well as responses of citizens when viewing the bribery activity in the lab. Differences in punishment levels, then, serve as an instrument for the “blame” put on the parties engaged in a corrupt act. Furthermore, the number of bribes sent and accepted act as an instrument for the pervasiveness of bribery in the two cultures. This methodology diverges from earlier cross-national studies in order to show the differences between strong and weak institutions, and the impact of corruption pervasiveness on citizen response to observed bribery at the micro level. We show that in the U.S., the citizens punish the firms slightly less than the government officials across all rounds where successful bribes have occurred, while in Pakistan the firms are punished significantly more than the officials. Furthermore, punishment reduces successful bribes in both cases, though in Pakistan bribe rejections increase while no bribing outcomes increase in the U.S. Overall, firms in Pakistan are punished higher than officials on average; and punishment has virtually no effect on the percentage of bribes offered. In the U.S., however, punishment is shown to lower both the proportion of bribes offered and accepted. Officials in both cultures are sensitive to punishment with U.S. “officials” slightly less resistant. We conclude that the presence and acceptability of corruption leads to a dearth in the accountability of officials such that the presence of bribery is attributed to the initiators of bribes rather than the executors of the consequences of bribery itself. This allows us an insight into how corruption affects institutions and thusly, how corruption can become self-enforcing over time.