Suchergebnisse

This Element provides an explanation for the power of weak states in international politics, focusing on the case of international climate negotiations at the United Nations. The author points to the pitfalls of assuming that weak countries elicit power from their coordinated salience for climate issues. Contrastingly, it is argued that weak states' influence at global climate negotiations depends on the moral authority provided by strong states. The author maintains that weak states' authority is contingent on international vulnerability, which intersects broader domestic discussions of global justice, and pushes the leaders of strong countries to concede power to weak countries. New empirical evidence is shown in support of the theory.

How is European media framing sensitive to events such as refugee border crossing and irregular migrants' arrivals? While news outlets adjust the tone around immigration following ideology, do the contextual characteristics of these incidents matter? This article explores two factors that could explain the varying framing of these highly political events in European mainstream media. One explanation focuses on the role of migrants' conditions, such as migrants' way of transit and subsequent human sufferance (or lack thereof). Another emphasizes the role of geography, in particular the location of migrants' territorial identification relative to the receiving communities. Focusing on the case of sea migration and small boat arrivals in Southern Europe, I argue that the emotional triggers determined by migrants' transit and their geographical point of detection systematically moderate each other, and jointly affect how the media describe these cross-border immigration events. Empirically, the article presents original newspaper data from Greece, Italy and Spain that collates geospatial information on immigrants' sea transit and the related number of injuries and deaths during transit. Statistical results indicate that media framing is more sympathetic to events involving suffering migrants, but that this positive framing diminishes if migrants are located only at the border of the national territory and disappears if the migrants are identified in more distant, foreign waters. The results suggest nuanced conditions in which migration can be presented by the media aside from their ideological lenses.

AbstractInternational environmental cooperation can impose significant costs on private firms. Yet, in recent years some companies have been supportive of international climate agreements. This suggests that under certain conditions environmental accords can be profitable. In this paper, I seek to explain this puzzle by focusing on the interaction between domestic regulation and decisions at international climate negotiations. I argue that global climate cooperation hurts the profits of polluting firms if domestic governments do not shield them from international compliance costs. Vice versa, if firms are subject to protective (i.e., insufficiently severe) policy instruments at home, firms can materially gain from international climate agreements that sustain expectations about their profitability. I test the argument with an event study of the effect of decisions at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on major European firms that received free carbon permits in the early stages of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS). The analysis suggests that financial markets carefully follow the international climate negotiations, and reward the regulated firms based on the outcome of UNFCCC decisions. The evidence also indicates the advantageous interplay between certain types of domestic regulations and international regimes for business. More generally, the results show the perils of privately supported policy for the effectiveness of international public good provision.

It is usually assumed that the cost of abating pollution is the main deterrent of domestic support for international climate cooperation. In particular, some scholars have argued that, due to the burden of pollution abatement, businesses commonly constrain governments, which then take less cooperative positions on global climate agreements. I suggest that this argument needs further qualification: pollution-related costs rarely have unconditional effects on preferences for global climate agreements. Instead, a sector's pollution level is more likely to influence preferences for climate cooperation if mediated by its trade exposure. If pollution is high, firms in high-trade sectors may be less able to absorb climate regulation, and hence they should be more sensitive to climate cooperation. If pollution is low, firms in high-trade sectors may support climate cooperation, because by being more efficient they are more capable of adjusting to regulation. These dynamics should then affect governmental positions on global climate politics. I test my sectoral argument with original data from business statements and national communications at the United Nations climate negotiations. In line with my argument, I find that businesses in trade-open sectors are more likely to oppose climate agreement as their sector's emissions increase. I also find that in countries where high-emission sectors are open to trade, governments have low preferences for climate cooperation. The findings have implications for the domestic politics of environmental agreements and the distributive politics of global public good provision.

ABSTRACTPolitical research on social media argues that new channels of technological communication influence political leadership. However, we do not know the extent to which social media affect the power of other authorities—for example, religious leaders—in the secular world. This article focuses on the social media presence of the Pope. I argue that the pontiff uses social media communication to explicitly address certain political issues. Specifically, I claim that his messages on the web tend to be more political when critical world events threaten peaceful international relations and frighten salient religious minorities. I investigated this argument by studying Pope Francis's statements on Twitter. The analysis indicates that the Pope is more likely to release political tweets during international crises, thus targeting issues that otherwise belong to other secular authorities. At the same time, it "normalizes" the Catholic Church's power in that it allows the Pope to maintain the Vatican's long tradition of safeguarding peace and protecting vulnerable populations. These findings have implications for the leadership of the Catholic Church in the modern world and extend to other papacies beyond Francis's.

Political scientists are increasingly interested in the impact of religious authority on modern politics. However, little attention has been paid to the conditions under which religious leaders are more likely to speak politically. Tackling this question, this article argues that religious authorities should issue political statements at the outbreak of international crises, when secular institutions are unwilling or incapable of taking clear political positions. I test this argument focusing on the Roman Vatican through a quantitative text analysis of the papal encyclicals from 1958 until today. Latent topic models indicate that political themes systematically emerge in the papal documents and that the timing of the more political encyclicals correlate with years in which international crises break out. The findings have implications for the understanding of the modern relations between state and church and the political mobilization of religion today.