Aya Kachi

European unilateralism and involuntary burden-sharing in global climate politics: A public opinion perspective from the other side

Powerful political actors in the international system quite frequently adopt unilateral policies whose implications extend beyond their respective borders. Examples include financial market regulation as well as taxation, trade and environmental policies. They do so to avoid lowest common-denominator outcomes in areas where they desire more ambitious international policies, and to motivate or coerce other countries to shoulder a part of the burden associated with problem solving. This article explores whether and how such unilateralism affects public opinion in other countries, arguing that such analysis can point to external constraints on unilateralism and is worthwhile also for normative reasons. Empirically, we examine the effect of a major unilateral European Union (EU) climate policy initiative, which regulates emissions from aircraft, on public opinion in India and the United States, the two largest democracies outside the EU. Based on survey experiments, we study the effects of cost and sovereignty considerations on people’s evaluation of the EU’s new policy. The results show that both types of concern play a significant role and may act as a constraint on unilateral European climate policy.

The m-STAR Model as an Approach to Modeled, Dynamic, Endogenous Interdependence in Comparative & International Political Economy

Even casual observation reveals obvious spatial patterns in labor-market outcomes and policies across the developed democracies, and within the European Union particularly. Labor-market policies entail significant cross-border spillovers, so strategic interdependence among developed democracies might explain this. However, these countries also faced common or very similar exogenous-external conditions and internal trends, which would also tend to generate spatial patterns in the domestic responses thereto, even without any interdependence. Likewise, membership in the EU itself presents both a series of common external stimuli and a set of strategic interdependencies in common and individual-country labor-market-relevant actions. Additionally, however, labor-market policies will themselves shape the patterns of economic interchange by which some of the interdependencies arise, and entry into the European Union typically presupposes a certain baseline set of shared national characteristics and orientations, raising the possibility that labor-market policies and the pattern of interdependence via institutional co-membership have common origin. That is, the policies of interest may also shape the patterns of connectivity affecting those outcomes, a complex sort of endogeneity known as selection in the dynamic networks literature. We have discussed elsewhere the severe empirical-methodological challenges in distinguishing the first two of these possible sources of spatial correlation (Galtons Problem). This paper extends those analyses, applying the multiparametric spatiotemporal autoregressive (m-STAR) model as a simple approach to modeling the patterns of interdependence simultaneously with its effects, while recognizing their possible endogeneity (i.e., selection). We do so in an empirical application attempting to disentangle the roles of economic interdependence, correlated external and internal stimuli, and EU membership in shaping labor-market policies in recent years.

Determinants of Public Support for International Climate Finance in Donor Countries

The adoption of the Warsaw mechanism on loss and damage has again highlighted the North-South divide in the part of the UNFCCC negotiations dealing with international climate finance. Current estimates put required funding from rich countries at 50 to 100 billion Euros per year to induce non-Annex I countries to take on greenhouse gas limitation commitments and to assist highly vulnerable countries. Results from survey-embedded conjoint experiments can help policy-makers anticipate opportunities and pitfalls in designing large-scale climate funding schemes. We implemented such experiments in the United States and Germany to better understand what institutional design characteristics are likely to garner more public support for climate funding among citizens in key developed countries. We find that climate funding receives more public support if it flows to efficient governments, funding decisions are made jointly by donor and recipient countries, funding is used both for mitigation and adaptation, and other donor countries contribute a large share. Contrary to what one might expect, climate change damage levels, income, and emissions in/of potential recipient countries have no significant effect on public support. These findings suggest that finance mechanisms that focus purely on compensating developing countries, without contributing to the global public good of mitigation, will find it hard to garner public support.