Michael M. Bechtel

Mass support for global climate agreements depends on institutional design

Effective climate mitigation requires international cooperation, and these global efforts need broad public support to be sustainable over the long run. We provide estimates of public support for different types of climate agreements in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Using data from a large-scale experimental survey, we explore how three key dimensions of global climate cooperation—costs and distribution, participation, and enforcement—affect individuals’ willingness to support these international efforts. We find that design features have significant effects on public support. Specifically, our results indicate that support is higher for global climate agreements that involve lower costs, distribute costs according to prominent fairness principles, encompass more countries, and include a small sanction if a country fails to meet its emissions reduction targets. In contrast to well-documented baseline differences in public support for climate mitigation efforts, opinion responds similarly to changes in climate policy design in all four countries. We also find that the effects of institutional design features can bring about decisive changes in the level of public support for a global climate agreement. Moreover, the results appear consistent with the view that the sensitivity of public support to design features reflects underlying norms of reciprocity and individuals’ beliefs about the potential effectiveness of specific agreements.

The Political Sources of Systematic Investment Risk: Lessons from a Consensus Democracy

This study examines the relationships between democratic politics and systematic investment (or capital) risk. Low risk is crucial to any well-functioning economy, as it encourages capital investment, facilitates growth, and enhances overall economic performance. This article distinguishes preelectoral, postelectoral, and institutional factors and examines how these influence systematic investment risk using daily stock market data from Germany. The results suggest that more (less) favorable and reliable investment conditions during the incumbency of right (left)-leaning governments lead to lower (higher) investment risk. This partisan effect is stronger the more inflation increases and depends on whether government is unified or divided. Investors also anticipate the effect of government partisanship: systematic risk decreases (increases) if the electoral prospects of a right (left)-leaning government enhance. Finally, grand coalition governments as well as periods of coalition formation trigger higher investment risk.

Does Compulsory Voting Increase Support for Leftist Policy

Citizens unequally participate in elections and this may systematically bias policy in favor of those who vote. Many view compulsory voting as an important tool to alleviate this problem, but we still know very little about its policy consequences. We argue that sanctioned compulsory voting mobilizes citizens at the bottom of the income distribution and that this translates into an increase in support for redistributive policies. We empirically explore the effects of a sanctioned compulsory voting law on direct-democratic decisionmaking in the Swiss canton of Vaud from 1908 to 1947, a formative period for the welfare state. We find that compulsory voting increases turnout in referendums by 30 percentage points to over 85% on average and doubles electoral support for left policy positions. We discuss the implications of these results for our understanding of the policy consequences of electoral institutions and the evolution of the modern welfare state. We thank Simon Jackman, Peter Selb, Kenneth Scheve, and audiences at Stanford University, the University of Konstanz, and the University of St.Gallen for valuable comments. We thank Yvan Rielle for providing data, and Fabian Morgenthaler, Christian Vogt and Nils Burk for valuable research assistance. Michael M. Bechtel gratefully acknowledges support by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant #PP00P1-139035). A full replication archive for this article will be made available online at the dataverse network (http://thedata.org/).Citizens unequally participate in referendums and this may systematically bias policy in favor of those who vote. Some view compulsory voting as an important tool to alleviate this problem while others worry about its detrimental effects on the legitimacy and quality of democratic decision-making. So far, however, we lack systematic knowledge about the causal effect of compulsory voting on public policy. We argue that sanctioned compulsory voting mobilizes citizens at the bottom of the income distribution and that this translates into an increase in support for leftist policies. We empirically explore the effects of a sanctioned compulsory voting law on direct-democratic decision-making in Switzerland. We find that compulsory voting significantly increases electoral support for leftist policy positions in referendums by up to 20 percentage points. We discuss the implications of these results for our understanding of the policy consequences of electoral institutions.

The Green Side of Protectionism: Environmental Concerns and Three Facets of Trade Policy Preferences

ABSTRACT A large literature in international political economy views individuals’ trade policy preferences as a function of the income effects of economic openness. We argue that the expected environmental consequences of free trade play a noteworthy role for protectionist attitudes that has not been noted so far. We use unique Swiss survey data that contain measures of individuals’ environmental concerns and different aspects of trade policy preferences to examine whether those who are more concerned about the environment also hold more protectionist trade policy preferences. Our results support this expectation. Individuals who are more concerned about the environment tend to think that globalization has more negative than positive effects, more strongly support jobs-related protectionism, and place more emphasis on aspects that go beyond price and quality when evaluating foreign products. Our results suggest that also the expected environmental consequences of free trade matter for trade policy preferences and not just the potential effects on the domestic wage distribution.

Reality Bites: The Limits of Framing Effects for Salient and Contested Policy Issues

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.

Forecasting European Union politics: Real-time forecasts in political time series analysis

Forecasting plays an increasingly important role in the scientific study of European Union politics and in political science in general. This is because forecasts are not only indispensable for (political) actors who need to form expectations about future events, but can also be used to judge the validity of (competing) theoretical models. While the debate about whether political science should engage in forecasting is largely over, many questions about how this should be done in everyday research are still open. One of these is how forecasts of political time series can be derived from theoretical models. Using a practical example from European Union research, we start to address this question. We first show how forecasts of political time series can be derived from both theoretical and atheoretical models. Subsequently, we use an atheoretical time series (ARMA) imputation approach to demonstrate how they can be fruitfully integrated in order to overcome some of the limitations to making forecasts of political time series which are based on theoretical models.

What Is Litigation in the World Trade Organization Worth

Conventional wisdom holds that the creation of international, court-like institutions helps countries to peacefully settle trade conflicts, thereby enhancing overall welfare. Many have argued, however, that these institutions remain ultimately ineffective because they merely reflect the distribution of power in the anarchic international system. We argue that international litigation provides economic spillovers that create opportunities for judicial free-riding and explore empirically how litigation in the World Trade Organization affects bilateral trade between countries involved in a trade dispute. We use a matching approach to compare the dynamics of trade flows between countries that experienced a panel ruling with trade relations of observably similar country pairs that did not experience a ruling. Based on this comparison we find that sectoral exports from complainant countries to the defendant increase by about

Compulsory Voting, Habit Formation, and Political Participation

7.7 billion in the three years after a panel ruling. However, countries that have proactively filed a complaint and carried the main costs of litigation do not systematically gain more than less-active third parties that merely joined an existing trade dispute. This suggests that international judicial institutions can provide positive economic externalities and may thereby lead to a less power-based distribution of the gains from trade.

Who Cooperates? Reciprocity and the Causal Effect of Expected Cooperation in Representative Samples

States, rms, and many other types of organizations rely on the internalization of norms to realize more cooperative outcomes. We examine norm internalization in the context of a severely sanctioned and long-standing compulsory voting law in the Swiss canton of Vaud (1900-1970). Compulsory voting strongly increases turnout in federal referenda, by about 30 percentage points on average. However, this eect quickly returns to zero after voting is no longer compulsory. Moreover, we nd only minor positive spillover eects on related forms of political participation. Our results challenge established theories of norm internalization in the context of political collective action.

Direct Democracy, Postal Voting, and the Composition of Turnout

When do societies succeed or fail to provide public goods? Previous research emphasizes that cooperation in public goods games correlates with expectations about cooperation by others among students and other selected demographic subgroups. So far, however, we lack knowledge about whether this reciprocity effect is causal and a general feature of populations. We fielded large-scale representative surveys (N=8,500) in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States that included a public goods game in combination with a novel randomized experiment and a survey instrument eliciting individuals conditional contribution schedules. We find that higher expected cooperation by others causes a significant increase in individual contributions. We also find that positive reciprocity is much more widespread among richer, younger and more educated respondents. Therefore, socio-demographic characteristics matter for understanding behavior in social dilemmas because of their association with social norms of conditional cooperation.