Reuben Kline

A new approach for evaluating climate change communication

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.

Passing It Along: Experiments on Creating the Negative Externalities of 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.

When Foul Play Seems Fair: Dishonesty as a Response to Violations of Just Deserts

We investigate the norm of just deserts and its effect on honesty. Just deserts is an essential norm in a market society, and honesty is an important factor in economic and social exchange. In particular, we analyze what happens when the social distributive rules betray the reasonable expectation that who deserves more will obtain a larger payoff. Using a formal-theoretic framework—equity theory—we explore the nexus between the perception of just deserts and honesty, combining cross-national survey (WVS) evidence and data from two laboratory experiments—conducted in the United States and Italy—to study whether violations of the principle of just deserts contribute to an increased tolerance for or an engagement in dishonest and corrupt acts. We find convergent evidence that violation of the just deserts norm results in a greater propensity toward self-serving dishonesty, and that this effect is distinct from the effect of inequality. Both the survey and experimental results also indicate that sensitivity to violations of the just deserts norm vary cross-nationally. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our results for theories of distributive justice and multiple equilibria in societal levels of honesty.

Differentiated responsibilities and prosocial behaviour in climate change mitigation

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.In a compound climate change dilemma that allows some to earn a pre-game advantage, advantaged participants act prosocially later to maintain a public good, but the disadvantaged act antisocially, creating conflict that reduces cooperative success.

High-risk high-reward investments to mitigate climate change

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.

Passive non-participation versus strategic defection in a collective risk social dilemma

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.

When Does Self-Interest Motivate Political Engagement? The Case of Climate Change

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 peoples 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.

Supermajority voting, social indifference and status quo constraints

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.

Towards an Improved Methodology in Analyzing Corruption: Insights from Citizen Responses to Corrupt Practices Across Countries

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.