Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-x24gv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-01T03:26:56.130Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Institutional Design and Elite Support for Climate Policies: Evidence from Latin American Countries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 July 2020

Danilo Freire Open the ORCID record for Danilo Freire [Opens in a new window] ,
Umberto Mignozzetti  and
David Skarbek
Danilo Freire*
Affiliation:
The Political Theory Project, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA, e-mail: danilo_freire@brown.edu
Umberto Mignozzetti
Affiliation:
School of International Relations, Fundação Getulio Vargas, São Paulo, SP, Brazil Wilf Family Department of Politics, New York University, New York, NY, USA, Twitter: @umbertomig; e-mail: umberto.mignozzetti@fgv.br
David Skarbek
Affiliation:
The Department of Political Science and the Political Theory Project, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA, Twitter: @davidskarbek; e-mail: david_skarbek@brown.edu
*
*Corresponding author. Email: danilo_freire@brown.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Which institutional features do Latin American elites favor for local climate change policies? Climate change mitigation requires active local-level implementation, but it remains unclear which institutional arrangements maximize support for environmental rules. In this paper, we run a conjoint experiment with elite members of 10 Latin American countries and ask respondents to evaluate institutional designs drawn from a pool of 5,500 possible local climate governance arrangements. We find that Latin American elites prefer international organizations to formulate climate policies, support imposing increasing fines on violators, and favor renewing agreements every 5 years. We also find that elites support both international institutions and local courts to mediate conflicts, but they distrust non-governmental organizations and reject informal norms as a means of conflict resolution. Our results identify possible challenges in crafting local climate mitigation policies and offer new insights about how to integrate local and international levels in environmental agreements.

Keywords

Climate changeelitesinstitutional designLatin Americaregime complex
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Summer 2021 , pp. 172 - 184
Copyright
© The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We thank Nigel Ashford, Fábio Barros, Frans Berkhout, Daniel D’Amico, Guilherme Fasolin, Manoel Galdino, Malte Hendricks, Stephen Herzog, Christian Hübner, Karina Marzano, Davi Moreira, Emily Skarbek, Paula Vedovelli, and the participants at the FGV IR Seminar for their valuable comments. Special thanks to Natalia Liberato, Lucas Mingardi, Ingrid Oliveira, Catarina Roman, Leticia Santana, and Larissa Santos for their excellent research assistance. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. This research received IRB approval from Brown University (Protocol 2195/2018) and Fundação Getulio Vargas (Protocol 83/2018). We acknowledge financial support from the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Latin American Regional Programme for Energy Security and Climate (EKLA-KAS) and declare there are no conflicts of interest. The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: doi:10.7910/DVN/VTA5OA.

References

REFERENCES

Abbott, K. W. and Snidal, D. 2000. Hard and Soft Law in International Governance. International Organization 54(3): 421–456.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aklin, M., Bayer, P., Harish, S., and Urpelainen, J. 2013. Understanding Environmental Policy Preferences: New Evidence from Brazil. Ecological Economics 94: 28–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andonova, L. B., Betsill, M. M., and Bulkeley, H. 2009. Transnational Climate Governance. Global Environmental Politics 9(2): 52–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bansak, K., Hainmueller, J., and Hangartner, D. 2016. How Economic, Humanitarian, and Religious Concerns Shape European Attitudes toward Asylum Seekers. Science 354(6309): 217–222.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bansak, K., Hainmueller, J., and Hangartner, D. 2017. Europeans Support a Proportional Allocation of Asylum Seekers. Nature Human Behaviour 1(7): 0133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barrett, S. 2008. Climate Treaties and the Imperative of Enforcement. Oxford Review of Economic Policy 24(2): 239–258.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bechtel, M. M., Genovese, F., and Scheve, K. F. 2019. Interests, Norms and Support for the Provision of Global Public Goods: The Case of Climate Co-Operation. British Journal of Political Science 49(4): 1333–1355.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bechtel, M. M. and Scheve, K. F. 2013. Mass Support for Global Climate Agreements Depends on Institutional Design. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110(34): 13763–13768.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bodin, Ö. 2017. Collaborative Environmental Governance: Achieving Collective Action in Social-Ecological Systems. Science 357(6352): 11–14.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bräuninger, T. and König, T. 2000) Making Rules for Governing Global Commons: The Case of Deep-Sea Mining. Journal of Conflict Resolution 44(5): 604–629.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bulkeley, H., Andonova, L. B., Betsill, M. M., Compagnon, D., Hale, T., Hoffmann, M. J., Newell, P., Paterson, M., VanDeveer, S. D., and Roger, C. 2014. Transnational Climate Change Governance. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Busch, J. 2015. Climate Change and Development in Three Charts. https://www.cgdev.org/blog/climate-change-and-development-three-charts. Access: July 2019.Google Scholar
Chalmers, A. W. 2017. When Banks Lobby: The Effects of Organizational Characteristics and Banking Regulations on International Bank Lobbying. Business and Politics 19(1): 107–134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cole, D. H. 2015. Advantages of a Polycentric Approach to Climate Change Policy. Nature Climate Change 5(2): 114–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Colgan, J. D., Keohane, R. O., and Van de Graaf, T. 2012. Punctuated Equilibrium in the Energy Regime Complex. The Review of International Organizations 7(2): 117–143.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Copelovitch, M. S. and Putnam, T. L. 2014. Design in Context: Existing International Agreements and New Cooperation. International Organization 68(2): 471–493.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dubash, N. K., Hagemann, M., Höhne, N., and Upadhyaya, P. 2013. Developments in National Climate Change Mitigation Legislation and Strategy. Climate Policy 13(6): 649–664.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckstein, D., Künzel, V., and Schäfer, L. 2017. Global Climate Risk Index 2018. Bonn: Germanwatch Nord-Süd Initiative eV.Google Scholar
Freire, D., Mignozzetti, U., and Skarbek, D. 2020. Replication Data for: Institutional Design and Elite Support for Climate Policies: Evidence from Latin American Countries. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VTA5OA.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friman, M. and Hjerpe, M. 2015. Agreement, Significance, and Understandings of Historical Responsibility in Climate Change Negotiations. Climate Policy 15(3): 302–320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hainmueller, J., Hopkins, D. J., and Yamamoto, T. 2014. Causal Inference in Conjoint Analysis: Understanding Multidimensional Choices via Stated Preference Experiments. Political Analysis 22(1): 1–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hjerpe, M. and Nasiritousi, N. 2015. Views on Alternative Forums for Effectively Tackling Climate Change. Nature Climate Change 5(9): 864.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huntjens, P., Lebel, L., Pahl-Wostl, C., Camkin, J., Schulze, R., and Kranz, N. 2012. Institutional Design Propositions for the Governance of Adaptation to Climate Change in the Water Sector. Global Environmental Change 22(1): 67–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jahn, D. 2016. The Politics of Environmental Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jordan, A. J., Huitema, D., Hildén, M., Van Asselt, H., Rayner, T. J., Schoenefeld, J. J., Tosun, J., Forster, J., and Boasson, E. L. 2015. Emergence of Polycentric Climate Governance and Its Future Prospects. Nature Climate Change 5(11): 977–982.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karapin, R. 2012. Explaining Success and Failure in Climate Policies: Developing Theory through German Case Studies. Comparative Politics 45(1): 46–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keohane, R. O. and Victor, D. G. 2011. The Regime Complex for Climate Change. Perspectives on politics 9(1): 7–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leeper, T. J. 2018. Cregg: Simple Conjoint Analyses and Visualization. Available at https://thomasleeper.com/cregg. Access: May 2019. R package version 0.3.0.Google Scholar
Leeper, T. J., Hobolt, S. B., and Tilley, J. 2018. Measuring Subgroup Preferences in Conjoint Experiments. https://bit.ly/2E5oKSq. Access: May 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lines, R. and Denstadli, J. M. 2004. Information Overload in Conjoint Experiments. International Journal of Market Research 46(3): 297–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Loewen, P. J., Rubenson, D., and Wantchekon, L. 2010. Help Me Help You: Conducting Field Experiments with Political Elites. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 628(1): 165–175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luna, J. P. and Zechmeister, E. J. 2005. Political Representation in Latin America: A Study of Elite-Mass Congruence in Nine Countries. Comparative Political Studies 38(4): 388–416.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marcoux, C. 2009. Institutional Flexibility in the Design of Multilateral Environmental Agreements. Conflict Management and Peace Science 26(2): 209–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Massey, E., Biesbroek, R., Huitema, D., and Jordan, A. 2014. Climate Policy Innovation: The Adoption and Diffusion of Adaptation Policies across Europe. Global Environmental Change 29: 434–443.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mildenberger, M. and Tingley, D. 2019. Beliefs about Climate Beliefs: The Importance of Second-Order Opinions for Climate Politics. British Journal of Political Science 49(4): 1279–1307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, R. B. 2006. Problem Structure, Institutional Design, and the Relative Effectiveness of International Environmental Agreements. Global Environmental Politics 6(3): 72–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, B., Höhne, N., and Ellermann, C. 2009. Differentiating (Historic) Responsibilities for Climate Change. Climate Policy 9(6): 593–611.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the Commons. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ostrom, E. 2014. A Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change. Annals of Economics & Finance 15(1): 97–134.Google Scholar
Pagliari, S. and Young, K. L. 2014. Leveraged Interests: Financial Industry Power and the Role of Private Sector Coalitions. Review of International Political Economy 21(3): 575–610.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pullman, M. E., Dodson, K. J., and Moore, W. L. 1999. A Comparison of Conjoint Methods When There Are Many Attributes. Marketing Letters 10(2): 125–138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raustiala, K. and Victor, D. G. 2004. The Regime Complex for Plant Genetic Resources. International Organization 58(2): 277–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
R Core Team 2018. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org. Access: May 2019.Google Scholar
Rogelj, J., Nabel, J., Chen, C., Hare, W., Markmann, K., Meinshausen, M., Schaeffer, M., Macey, K., and Höhne, N. 2010. Copenhagen Accord Pledges Are Paltry. Nature 464(7292): 1126.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rosen, A. M. 2015. The Wrong Solution at the Right Time: The Failure of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. Politics & Policy 43(1): 30–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosendorff, B. P. and Milner, H. V. 2001. The Optimal Design of International Trade Institutions: Uncertainty and Escape. International Organization 55(4): 829–857.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Victor, D. G., Akimoto, K., Kaya, Y., Yamaguchi, M., Cullenward, D., and Hepburn, C. 2017. Prove Paris Was More than Paper Promises. Nature News 548(7665): 25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Von Stein, J. 2008. The International Law and Politics of Climate Change: Ratification of the United Nations Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol. Journal of Conflict Resolution 52(2): 243–268.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winning, M., Price, J., Ekins, P., Pye, S., Glynn, J., Watson, J., and McGlade, C. (2019). Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement and the Costs of Delayed Action. Climate Policy 19(8): 947–958.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Freire et al. supplementary material

Freire et al. supplementary material

Download Freire et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 575.3 KB
Supplementary material: Link

Freire et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VTA5OA
Link