Lena Maria Schaffer

Climate Change Governance

Within less than three decades, climate change has developed from a rather obscure scientific topic into a key item on the global political agenda. It has also attracted strong attention in many areas of scientific research, including the social sciences. Social scientists, and notably governance specialists focusing on climate change have addressed a wide range of important questions, including the following: • What are the key political challenges in establishing and implementing governance systems to cope with climatic changes? • Why are some countries in the international system more cooperative than others in this respect? • To what extent can local efforts in climate policy support national and global efforts? • What are the main normative issues associated with climate change policy, notably, how should the costs and benefits associated with solving the problem be distributed across countries and time? • Which policy instruments are likely to be more effective and/or efficient in dealing with climate change? In this contribution we focus mainly on the first four of these questions.

How to measure public demand for policies when there is no appropriate survey data

Explanatory models accounting for variation in policy choices by democratic governments usually include a demand (by the public) and a supply (by the government) component, whereas the latter component is usually better developed from a measurement viewpoint. The main reason is that public opinion surveys, the standard approach to measuring public demand, are expensive, difficult to implement simultaneously for different countries for purposes of crossnational comparison and impossible to implement ex post for purposes of longitudinal analysis if survey data for past time periods are lacking. We therefore propose a new approach to measuring public demand, focussing on political claims made by nongovernmental actors and expressed in the news. To demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of our measure of published opinion, we focus on climate policy in the time period between 1995 and 2010. When comparing the new measure of published opinion with the best available public opinion survey and internet search data, it turns out that our data can serve as a meaningful proxy for public demand.