Ambitious policies for limiting climate change require strong public support 1,3,12,15,16,19,20,29. But the public's appetite for such policies, as currently observed in most countries, is rather limited 3,27. One possibility for enhancing public support could be to shift the main justification in the public policy discourse on greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation from benefits of reducing climate change risks (the conventional justification) to other types of benefits. Technological innovation and green jobs, community building, and health benefits are widely discussed candidates 2,

Onsets of binary events are often of interest to political scientists, whether they be regime changes, the occurrence of civil war, or the signing of bilateral agreements, to name a few. Often researchers transform the binary event outcome of interest, by setting ongoing years to zero, to create a variable which measures the onset of the event. While this may seem an intuitive way to go about estimating models where onset is the outcome of interest, it results in two problems that can affect substantive inferences. First, it creates two qualitatively different meanings for a unit time period to have a zero, which estimators are unable to “know.” Second, it ignores the possibility that variables may have differing effects upon binary event onsets and durations. This article explores how much this transformation can harm our substantive inferences by analytically demonstrating the resulting bias and the use of Monte Carlo experiments, as well as offering recommendations to avoid these problems. I also conduct a sensitivity analysis on the determinants of civil war onset to examine how substantive inferences are affected by this issue. In doing so, I find that there is considerable difference in the size of estimated coefficients and whether a variable is considered a robust determinant of civil war.

Conventional wisdom holds that climate change poses a global public goods problem, thus requiring a global solution that reduces greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions worldwide through some form of centralized target setting and burden-sharing arrangement among countries. Yet, the 2015 Paris Agreement has essentially given up on this approach, on which the 1997 Kyoto Protocol was based, and now relies on policies that are adopted unilaterally and voluntarily by individual countries. Since ambitious climate policies are very unlikely to be enacted and effectively implemented without strong public support, research is beginning to explore how strong public support is for unilateral climate policy and what its determinants are. Recent research has developed useful survey instruments to gauge public support for unilateral climate policy. Results from surveys and survey-embedded experiments show that when respondents are confronted with cost implications and free-riding problems associated with unilateral climate policy, public support tends to drop to some extent, but still remains quite high. Current research thus shows that people are-the hitherto strong global public goods framing of climate policy notwithstandingsurprisingly nonreciprocal in their climate policy preferences. Preferences concerning climate policy tend to be driven primarily by a range of personal predispositions and cost considerations, which existing research has already explored quite extensively, rather than by considerations of what other countries do.

The traditional political economy account of global climate change governance directs our attention to fundamental collective action problems associated with global public goods provision, resulting from positive or negative externalities as well as freeriding. The governance architecture of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol uses the traditional approaches of international diplomacy for addressing such challenges: legally binding commitments based on principles of reciprocity and (fair) cost/burden sharing via formalized carbon-budgeting. Yet, the 2015 Paris Agreement has essentially abandoned this approach, as it now operates on the basis of internationally coordinated and monitored unilateralism. On the presumption that public opinion matters for government policy, we examine how citizens view this shift in climate policy from reciprocity to unilateralism, after many years of exposure to strong reciprocity rhetoric by governments and stakeholders. To that end, we fielded a survey experiment in China, the world's largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter. The results show that there is, perhaps surprisingly, strong and robust public support for unilateral, non-reciprocal climate policy. To the extent China is interested in pushing ahead with ambitious and thus costly GHG reduction policies, our results suggest that China can leverage segments of public support in order to overcome domestic obstacles to GHG mitigation policies.

In the aftermath of financial crises, governments can use economic policy to minimize the risk of future recurrence. Yet not all do so. To explain this divergence in responses I develop a theory of economic policy choice after financial crises. I argue that past financial crises provide information to future governments about the political costs of financial crises. This subsequently informs the need to use economic policy to insure against such crises. Focusing on the accumulation of foreign exchange reserves after currency crises, I find that when past currency crises led to political changes future governments accumulate higher levels of reserves to prevent another crisis from occurring. This effect is stronger when political change occurred in situations where governments would not expect to be held accountable, and when reserve sales were shown to be effective in preventing political change. The theory and empirical results provide an answer as to why countries experiencing a similar form of financial crisis can, nevertheless, vary in their attempts to prevent future recurrence.