Historical Legacies and Policy Reform: Diverse Regional Reactions to British Columbia’s Carbon Tax (original) (raw)
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Retrospective voting studies typically examine policies where the public has common interests. By contrast, climate policy has broad public support but concentrated opposition in communities where costs are imposed. This spatial distribution of weak supporters and strong, local opponents mirrors opposition to other policies with diffuse public benefits and concentrated local costs. I use a natural experiment to investigate whether citizens living in proximity to wind energy projects retrospectively punished an incumbent government because of its climate policy. Using both fixed effects and instrumental variable estimators, I identify electoral losses for the incumbent party ranging from 4-10%, with the effect persisting 3 km from wind turbines. Voters also discriminate by correctly punishing the level of government responsible for the policy, providing evidence that voters are informed. I conclude that the spatial distribution of citizens' policy preferences can affect democratic accountability and exacerbate political barriers to addressing climate change.
ECOLOGICAL DETERMINANTS OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT OPPOSITION TO FEDERAL POLICY
Journal of Urban Affairs
Public protest is usually conceived as challenge to the state, overlooking protest performed by governments within state structures. We identify local government opposition to federal policy decisions as a combination of contentious politics and policy innovation. This theoretical framework highlights the role of social structural conditions, political culture, and contextual pressures, which we examine using local government opposition to the USA PATRIOT Act as a case study. We employ multilevel mixed models on a merged data set constructed from (1) a list of places that opposed the Patriot Act, (2) the U.S. Census 2000, and (3) aggregated CBS News/New York Times national polls. We find that social and political variables at the community and at the state levels substantively impact the odds that local government entities express dissent to the Patriot Act. Results also show that prior instances of protest within a state carry significant weight for the process of remonstration.
stamps.ntu.ac.uk
Whilst local political elites are happy in principle to support public participation initiatives, in practice they appear unwilling to incorporate outcomes into their own policy and decision making processes. This paper argues that Jim Bulpitt's 'statecraft interpretation' can be adapted to the arena of local politics and used to provide a plausible explanation for these local political elite attitudes and behaviours. This 'local statecraft' model suggests that, when faced by participatory initiatives local political elites make a calculation based on; their local governing code; the possibilities for local polity management; and the prevailing context. Ultimately this calculation is non-ideological and is structured by the twin objectives of winning elections and governing competently. The paper concludes by highlighting the implications for research and policy. This is very much a work in progress -all suggestions and comments welcome. Please do not cite without the permission of the author
Nonpolicy issues and the spatial theory of voting
Quality & Quantity, 1994
The traditional spatial model of elections places voters and candidates in an ideological space. Empirical analysis of spatial theory uses voter ratings of candidate and ideal positions on policy issue scales. The spatial model can be enhanced by the incorporation of nonpolicy components as well. These nonpolicy issues can be descriptive (age, ethnicity) or affective (honesty, competence). Using responses for a survey conducted during the 1965 Canadian federal election, an empirical evaluation of these nonpolicy issues is made. Voters are not unanimous in perceptions of parties (or candidates) on nonpolicy dimensions. The traditional spatial model can be extended to include individual voter ideal points and perceptions. This enhanced model proves quite successful at predicting vote choice.
Representation and Local Policy
Political Research Quarterly
Students of local politics have argued American federalism implies little role for local tastes in policy making. Peterson (1979) anticipates the pursuit of a productive tax base will depress subnational government spending on social services, while promoting developmental policies. We investigate the role public opinion plays in county-level redistributive, developmental, and allocational program spending in California, using a novel measure of county political ideology. Our findings challenge expectations that local governments are uniformly biased against redistribution. We find that social service spending varies across counties as a function of ideological orientation. In several policy areas, institutional structure mediates the responsiveness of officials.
Micro-Motives for State and Local Climate Change Initiatives
To date, the majority of states and at least hundreds of cities have adopted local climate change initiatives, while the federal government has been anything between passive about to hostile toward climate change issues. State and city climate change initiatives pose a puzzle: why do citizens and politicians support actions the costs of which will be borne locally and any potential benefits will be shared with any living being on the earth? In this Essay, we address this puzzle through an analysis of the potential incentives of supporters of local climate change initiatives. Our analysis indicates that some of the support stems from informed, utility maximizing decisions and some is derived from various biases that affect individual decisionmaking. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that state and city climate change initiatives could affect incentives of elected and non-elected federal officials in ways that could lead to effective federal action on climate change.