Discourse network analysis: policy debates as dynamic networks

Political discourse is the verbal interaction between political actors. Political actors make normative claims about policies conditional on each other. This renders discourse a dynamic network phenomenon. Accordingly, the structure and dynamics of policy debates can be analyzed with a combination of content analysis and dynamic network analysis. After annotating statements of actors in text sources, networks can be created from these structured data, such as congruence or conflict networks at the actor or concept level, affiliation networks of actors and concept stances, and longitudinal versions of these networks. The resulting network data reveal important properties of a debate, such as the structure of advocacy coalitions or discourse coalitions, polarization and consensus formation, and underlying endogenous processes like popularity, reciprocity, or social balance. The added value of discourse network analysis over survey-based policy network research is that policy processes can be analyzed from a longitudinal perspective. Inferential techniques for understanding the micro-level processes governing political discourse are being developed

Polarization of coalitions in an agent-based model of political discourse

Political discourse is the verbal interaction between political actors in a policy domain. This article explains the formation of polarized advocacy or discourse coalitions in this complex phenomenon by presenting a dynamic, stochastic, and discrete agent-based model based on graph theory and local optimization. In a series of thought experiments, actors compute their utility of contributing a specific statement to the discourse by following ideological criteria, preferential attachment, agenda-setting strategies, governmental coherence, or other mechanisms. The evolving macro-level discourse is represented as a dynamic network and evaluated against arguments from the literature on the policy process. A simple combination of four theoretical mechanisms is already able to produce artificial policy debates with theoretically plausible properties. Any sufficiently realistic configuration must entail innovative and path-dependent elements as well as a blend of exogenous preferences and endogenous opinion formation mechanisms

Parallel Climate Blocs. Incentives to cooperation in international climate negotiations

There are increasing signals that countries that negotiate on GHG emission control are unlikely to sign and ratify a single climate protocol, even though almost all countries have subscribed the UNFCCC convention that sets the framework of international climate cooperation. In addition to the US decision not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, New Zealand and Australia recently led to the formation of a new alliance in which technological cooperation is the main tool to achieve GHG emission control. In the U.S., some States on the Eastern coast are negotiating to adopt emission reduction targets and to establish a permit market despite the opposition of the federal government. Cooperation on climate policy is also the objective of recent negotiations between ASEAN countries. Given this background, this paper aims at examining whether the aforementioned events are simply the noise of a political process leading to a global agreement on climate change control or are instead consistent with some basic economic incentives that are pushing countries towards the formation of two (or more) parallel climate blocs. To this aim, this paper uses a well known integrated assessment climate-economy model to evaluate the incentives to cooperation in climate negotiations for the main world countries. A game-theoretic framework is adopted to analyse a country’s incentive to belong to a climate coalition. In our setting, a given country can either join one of the existing climate coalitions or can propose a new one or can decide to free-ride on the other countries’ cooperative abatement effort. We then analyse the characteristics of the main possible outcomes and assess which outcomes are most likely to prevail in future negotiations, at least as far as economic incentives are concerned.Agreements, Climate, Incentives, Negotiations, Policy

Anti-Racist Policies in France. From Ideological and Historical Schemes to Socio-Political Realities

In France, since the 1980s, imaginaries derived from decolonization have played a major role in the elaboration of anti-racist policies. Simultaneously, because of the universalistic conception of the French Republic, the use of ethnic categories has been taboo and systematically replaced, in political schemes, by socio-economic criteria. Multiculturalism, in the Anglo-Saxon meaning, has therefore not been a traditional political analysis framework. Nevertheless, since the 1990s, the French model of integration, which was based on the individual, has been more and more accused of giving way to inequalities and racism. For ten years, the rise of the concept of the «ethnicization» of cultural groups in public debate has thus inspired political demands that require concrete answers, notably against urban violence and education.Anti-racist policies, French model of integration, Multiculturalism, Ethnicization, Urban violence, Education

A Climate-Change Policy Induced Shift from Innovations in Energy Production to Energy Savings

We develop an endogenous growth model with capital, labor and energy as production factors and three productivity variables that measure accumulated innovations for energy production, energy savings, and neutral growth. All markets are complete and perfect, except for research, for which we assume that the marginal social value exceeds marginal costs by factor four. The model constants are calibrated so that the model reproduces the relevant trends over the 1970-2000 period. The model contains a simple climate module, and is used to assess the impact of Induced Technological Change (ITC) for a policy that aims at a maximum level of atmospheric CO2 concentration (450 ppmv). ITC is shown to reduce the required carbon tax by about a factor 2, and to reduce costs of such a policy by about factor 10. Numerical simulations show that knowledge accumulation shifts from energy production to energy saving technology.Induced technological change, Environmental taxes, Partial equilibrium

A Non-cooperative Foundation of Core-Stability in Positive Externality NTU-Coalition Games

We identify the core as an appealing stability concept of cooperative game theory, but argue that the non-cooperative approach has conceptual advantages in the context of economic problems with externalities. Therefore, we derive a non-cooperative foundation of core-stability for positive externality NTU-games. First, in the spirit of Hart/Kurz (1983), we develop a game that we call ?-game and show that strong Nash equilibria coalition structures in this game are identical to ?- and ?-core stable coalition structures. Second, as a by-product of the definition of the ?-game, we develop an extension called an ?-game. Finally, we compare equilibria in the ?- and ?-game with those in the ?- and ?-game of Hart and Kurz (1983).Core-stability, non-cooperative game theory, positive externality games

China and the Evolution of the Present Climate Regime

The recent events that followed the US decision not to comply with the Kyoto Protocol seem to drastically undermine the effectiveness of the Protocol in controlling GHG emissions. Therefore, it is important to explore whether there are economic factors and policy strategies that might help the US to modify its current policy and move back to the Kyoto-Bonn agreement. For example, can an increased participation of developing countries induce the US to effectively participate in the effort to reduce GHG emissions? Is a single emission trading market the appropriate policy framework to increase participation in the Kyoto-Bonn agreement? This paper addresses the above questions by analysing whether the participation of China in the cooperative effort to control GHG emissions can provide adequate incentives for the US to move back to the Kyoto process and eventually ratify the Kyoto Protocol. This paper analyses three different climate regimes in which China could be involved and assesses the participation incentives for the major world countries and regions in these three regimes.Agreements, Climate, Incentives, Negotiations, Policy

Languages Disenfranchisement in the European Union

We introduce the notion of language disenfranchisement which arises if the number of EU working languages is reduced. We use the data on language proficiency in EU and show that, in spite of the widespread knowledge of English, the retention of French and German as working languages in essential to avoid a too large degree of disenfranchisement of citizens. The picture, however, becomes somewhat different if we consider the population under age of 40. We also argue that even though French is the second leading language within the EU, the situation is likely to be reversed after the enlargement.Languages, Disenfranchisement, European Union

Bicameralism and Government Formation

In this paper we present a structural approach to the study of government formation in multi-party parliamentary democracies. The approach is based on the estimation of a stochastic bargaining model which we use to investigate the effects of specific institutional features of parliamentary democracy on the formation and stability of coalition governments. We then apply our methodology to estimate the effects of governmental bicameralism. Our main findings are that eliminating bicameralism does not affect government durability, but does have a significant effect on the composition of governments leading to smaller coalitions. These results are due to an equilibrium replacement effect: removing bicameralism affects the relative durability of coalitions of different sizes which in turn induces changes in the coalitions that are chosen in equilibrium.Political stability, Government formation, Government dissolution, Bicameralism, Comparative constitutional design