Greener governments : partisan ideologies, executive institutions and environmental policies

Why do some governments have more environmentally friendly policies than others? Part of the answer involves governing parties' ideological positions on environmentalism and the constraints imposed by executive institutions. This paper elaborates this party-based explanation and tests it with uniquely comparable indicators of national environmental policies for governments in 27 countries in the European Union. The findings show that governments with parties that emphasized environmental protection in their manifestos are more likely to propose pro-environment policies during EU-level negotiations. However, the effect of ideology is mediated by the centralization of the national executive branch. In centralized national executives the environmental positions of prime ministers' parties affect policies, while in decentralized national executives the positions of environment ministers' parties are relevant. The findings have implications for understanding the impact of parties’ environmental positions on government policies, as well as for policymaking in coalitions more generally

Explaining state participation in environmental treaties

THESIS 9894This project aims to advance the literature on the dynamics of state participation in environmental treaties. The overarching question is, how do we explain the variance in state signature and ratification of environmental treaties

Testing models of legislative decision-making with measurement error : the robust predictive power of bargaining models over procedural models

Previous studies found that models emphasising legislative procedures make less accurate predictions of decision outcomes in the EU than the compromise model, a computationally simple variant of the Nash Bargaining Solution. In this journal, Slapin (2014) argues that this and other findings may be the result of measurement error. While acknowledging the importance of measurement error, we disagree with several assumptions in Slapin’s analysis, and show that his results are driven by an unrealistic assumption about how policy preferences are distributed among EU decision makers. We construct simulated data that more accurately reflect the distributions of policy preferences found in existing empirical evidence and suggested by theory, and demonstrate that measurement error is unlikely to have biased previous findings. If real-world decision-making took place according to the procedural model, then it would have made the most accurate predictions, even with data containing large amounts of measurement error. While this strengthens our confidence in previous studies’ findings, we explain why we should not discard procedural models