Suchergebnisse

This text is about the political events and decisions in the 1980s and 1990s that established the global economy we have today. Different social scientists and other commentators have described the foundations of globalization very differently. Some have linked the rise of free trade and multinational enterprises to the democratic expression of ordinary people's hopes and desires; others have said they were a top-down project requiring, if anything, the circumvention of democracy. This work shows that politicians did not decide to embrace globalization because of the preferences of the mass public. Instead, using comparative-historical case studies of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, this text shows that politicians' decisions reflected the agendas and outlooks of various kinds of elites.

Review of: From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice within Government Agencies, by Jill Lindsey Harrison. Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 2019. 328 pp. ISBN: 9780262537742.

AbstractThis article reviews recent studies showing that distrust lies at the heart of the serious crisis of sustainability that humanity is failing to address, insofar as distrust of environmental scientists, communicators, and policymakers are all undermining public demand for better public policies. Generalised distrust of scientists is rare, but political distrust is ubiquitous, such that even people who are concerned about environmental problems are often opposed to potential policy solutions. There are also people, however, who do not even believe in some of the problems—most notably climate change. This scepticism is sometimes interpreted as a consequence of their preferring free markets to regulation; in other ways, though, the sceptics are not at all sympathetic to free markets. What appears more distinctive about them is their distrust of virtually all elite social institutions, including communities of experts, and a corresponding divide between their beliefs and preferences and those of experts generally.

This article presents results from survey experiments investigating conditions under which Britons are willing to pay taxes on polluting activities. People are no more willing if revenues are hypothecated for spending on environmental protection, while making such taxes more relevant to people – by naming petrol and electricity as products to which they will apply – has a modestly negative effect. Public willingness increases sharply if people are told that new environmental taxes would be offset by cuts to other taxes, but political distrust appears to undermine much of this effect. Previous studies have argued that political trust shapes public opinion with respect to environmental and many other policies. But this article provides the first experimental evidence suggesting that the relationship is causal, at least for one specific facet: cynicism about public officials' honesty and integrity. The results suggest a need to make confidence in the trustworthiness of public officials and their promises more central to conceptualizations of political trust.

Previous studies have argued that political trust shapes public opinion with respect to policies for environmental protection, but this paper provides the first evidence that the relationship is causal. The paper presents results from survey experiments investigating conditions under which Britons are willing to pay taxes on polluting activities. Public willingness to pay increases sharply if new environmental taxes are offset by cuts to other kinds of taxes, but political distrust undermines much of the effect of this revenue-neutrality. People are also no more willing if revenues are hypothecated for spending on environmental protection, while making such taxes more tangible to people—by naming petrol and electricity as specific products to which they will apply—has a modestly negative effect.

Geoengineering could be taken by the public as a way of dealing with climate change without reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This paper presents the results of survey experiments testing whether hearing about solar radiation management (SRM) affects people's support for taxing polluting energy and/or their trust in climate science. For a nationally representative sample of respondents in Britain, I found that receiving a brief introduction to SRM had no impact on most people's willingness to pay taxes, nor on their trust in climate science. Hearing about this form of geoengineering therefore appears unlikely to erode support for emissions reductions. Specifically for political conservatives asked first about paying taxes, moreover, hearing about SRM increased trust in climate science. These and other results of the experiments also provide partial support for the theory that conservatives' lower trust in climate science generally stems from their aversion to regulatory action by the state.

Increasing numbers of comparative survey datasets span multiple waves. Moving beyond purely cross-sectional analyses, multilevel longitudinal analyses of such datasets should generate substantively important insights into the political, social and economic correlates of many individual-level outcomes of interest (attitudes, behaviors, etc.). This article describes two simple techniques for extracting such insights, which allow change over time in y to be a function of change over time in x and/or of a time-invariant x. The article presents results from simulation studies that assess the techniques in the presence of complications that are likely to arise with real-world data, and concludes with applications to the issues of generalized social trust and postmaterialist values, using data from World/European Values Surveys. Adapted from the source document.

Increasing numbers of comparative survey datasets span multiple waves. Moving beyond purely cross-sectional analyses, multilevel longitudinal analyses of such datasets should generate substantively important insights into the political, social and economic correlates of many individual-level outcomes of interest (attitudes, behaviors, etc.). This article describes two simple techniques for extracting such insights, which allow change over time in y to be a function of change over time in x and/or of a time-invariant x. The article presents results from simulation studies that assess the techniques in the presence of complications that are likely to arise with real-world data, and concludes with applications to the issues of generalized social trust and postmaterialist values, using data from World/European Values Surveys.

"Development: Institutional Perspectives" published on by Oxford University Press.

In shifting from nationalist/statist to neoliberal economic policies, states seek out and build alliances with other advocates—especially large capital—and work to disorganize political opponents—including small business. This article examines the politics of the private sector's involvement in trade liberalization in the developing world through a study of Mexico's proposal, negotiation, and ratification of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The article identifies three instruments that the Mexican state used to construct politically crucial support for NAFTA on the part of domestic business: control over political representation, material concessions to potential critics, and careful strategic framing.