Suchergebnisse

Laws restricting foreign funding to domestically operating nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have proliferated in developing countries. This is puzzling because Western powers support the norm that NGOs are critical for democracy and development, recommend governments partner with NGOs, and sometimes use trade sanctions to encourage adherence to this norm. We examine whether rising trade with China influences the onset of NGO restrictions. China, which has emerged as an important export destination, articulates a different norm of state sovereignty over NGOs and does not sanction developing countries that enact restrictive NGO laws. Analysis of 153 developing countries from 2000 to 2015 finds that increasing exports to China may double the risk of NGO crackdown, but only when accompanied by declining exports to Western democracies. NGO scholars should recognize there are multiple norms about state-NGO relationship and that norm acceptance is influenced by the economic clout of the power that espouses a particular norm.

We take this opportunity to comment on Herron and Shotts (2003; hereinafter HS) because of its interesting and productive ideas and because of the potential to affect the way a considerable body of practical research is conducted. This article, and the literature referenced therein, is based on the suggestions in three paragraphs in King (1997, pp. 289–290). Because these paragraphs were not summarized in HS, we thought they might be a useful place to start.

AbstractPublic support for policy instruments is influenced by perceptions of how benefits and costs are distributed across various groups. We examine different carbon tax designs outlining different ways to distribute tax revenues. Using a national online sample of 1,606 US respondents, we examine support for a $20/ton carbon tax that is: (1) revenue neutral: revenue is returned to citizens via tax cuts; (2) compensation‐focused: revenue is directed to helping actors disproportionately hurt by the tax; (3) mitigation‐focused: revenue funds projects reducing carbon emissions; and (4) adaptation‐focused: revenue is directed to enhancing community resilience to extreme weather events. We find devoting revenue to mitigation raises overall support for carbon tax by 6.3 per cent versus the control (54.9 per cent) where no information on spending is provided. Other frames raise support in specific subgroups only. Revenue neutrality raises support among lower‐income households (+6.6 per cent) and political independents (+9.4 per cent), while compensation increases support among lower‐income repondents (+6.1 per cent).

AbstractBecause the American states operate under balanced budget requirements, increases in spending in one area typically entail equal and opposite budget cuts in other programs. The literature analysing the correlates of government spending by policy area has mostly ignored these trade-offs inherent to policymaking, failing to address one of the most politically interesting and important dimensions of fiscal policy. Borrowing from the statistical literature on compositional data, we present more appropriate and efficient methods that explicitly incorporate the budget constraint into models of spending by budget category. We apply these methods to eight categories of spending from the American states over the years 1984–2009 to reveal winners and losers in the scramble for government spending. Our findings show that partisan governments finance their distinct priorities by raiding spending items that the opposition prefers, while different political institutions, economic conditions and state demographics impose different trade-offs across the budget.

Spectacular economic growth in China suggests the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has somehow gotten it right. A key hypothesis in both economics and political science is that the CCP's cadre evaluation system, combined with China's geography-based governing logic, has motivated local administrators to compete with one another to generate high growth. We raise a number of theoretical and empirical challenges to this claim. Using a new biographical database of Central Committee members, a previously overlooked feature of CCP reporting, and a novel Bayesian method that can estimate individual-level correlates of partially observed ranks, we find no evidence that strong growth performance was rewarded with higher party ranks at any of the postreform party congresses. Instead, factional ties with various top leaders, educational qualifications, and provincial revenue collection played substantial roles in elite ranking, suggesting that promotion systems served the immediate needs of the regime and its leaders, rather than encompassing goals such as economic growth.

Environmental clubs have proliferated across sectors and issue areas. We examine the diffusion of the chemical industry's Responsible Care® (RC) program. Much of the work on the diffusion of clubs has focused on the demand side: why firms join these clubs despite the costs of doing so. There is some work focusing on the supply side: why actors establish or create a new club. However, there is virtually no work examining why national-level industry associations decide to subscribe to an existing global environmental club in order to make it available to their members. Industry organizations in 17 lower and middle-income countries have joined RC, comprising 25 percent of RC members. We ask, in the context of developing countries, what motivates national associations to join RC? Drawing on an original dataset of RC global diffusion in 195 countries (1985–2017), we estimate a Cox proportional hazards model of the risk of joining RC. We find that RC adoption is more likely when a country exports chemicals to other countries that have joined RC (the California effect) and is unaffected by the total volume of its chemical trade. Thus, while exposure to global markets per se may not influence RC adoption, incentives change considerably when countries' key importers signal their support for these environmental practices. This is because importing firms often realize that because they have joined Responsible Care, NGOs and stakeholders expect them to demand that their overseas suppliers adopt the same sort of environmental policies and work place safety practices. In addition, peer pressure and learning matter: RC adoption is more likely when countries in close physical vicinity (e.g., within 500 miles) have joined the club. Finally, domestic factors play a role as well: both the level of democracy and the size of the economy encourage national associations to join RC.

What effects do interest groups have on the democratization and legitimacy of the European Union (EU)? Interest groups can democratize the EU only to the extent that they do not replicate inequalities. We use a newly constructed database to look for inequalities: Are the big organizations in Brussels the same as the ones in the EU member states? Are some member states' lobbies more active than others? And does the structure of EU lobbying create insiders and outsiders itself? We find representative biases in favor of powerful incumbents, groups from some member states and wellresourced groups.