“The effect of policy traceability on legislative incentives” (with Alexander Sahn)
Theories of legislative politics have long emphasized how a policy's traceability---whether and how voters connect legislative action with policy effects---shapes political incentives to legislate. Arnold (1992) emphasized how the ``nature of the causal chain that links a policy instrument with its policy effects” structures the logic of congressional action. Despite its prominence, this key theoretical claim has received little empirical attention. In this letter, we use two survey experiments to test whether legislators and the public hold traceability in mind when generating policy preferences. We find that elites are responsive to both policy traceability and problem traceability---whether a policy problem itself can be linked to elite actions. By contrast, prospective voters are indifferent to both forms of traceability. With respect to other policy attributes, elites and mass publics share similar preferences. Our results provide support for a previously untested theory of policymaking and describe the nature of strategic decision-making by legislators.
“Conditionality and the politics of climate change” (with Mark Buntaine an Michaël Aklin)
Conditional commitments are thought to be a stepping stone toward deeper cooperation between states. However, while states frequently make conditional policy pledges during international negotiations on climate change, their empirical effects remain unclear. We conducted three experiments in ten of the largest carbon-emitting countries to test whether conditional pledges made by national governments to mitigate climate change increase public preferences for ambitious climate action in other countries. The results reveal that only unconditional pledges made by foreign countries increase public preferences for policy ambition, and that countries seeking financial and technical transfers only gain support from the public in sending countries when they couple conditional pledges with ambitious unconditional pledges. We also find that the public in most countries only prefers to make part of their country's climate pledge conditional on other countries' action when at high levels of unconditional ambition. Overall, conditional bargaining between countries does not appear to significantly shape public preferences for cooperation on climate change.
“Risk salience and intertemporal welfare trade-offs in climate policymaking” (with Alexander Sahn, Michelle Hummell, Chris Miljanich, and Mark Lubell)
Climate change poses enormous social and economic costs, yet public and political responses to the climate threat remain anemic. One factor shaping this disconnect is the intertemporal dilemma raised by climate policy: governments must impose short-term costs to deliver long-term benefits. To increase public support for present-day climate actions, some governments have provided individual and neighborhood-level climate risk maps to the public in a bid to raise their salience. We evaluate the efficacy of these efforts using a high spatial-resolution survey experiment that exploits address-level differences in projected sea-level rise exposure. Contrary to expectations, we find that providing the public with individualized information about local climate hazards reduces concern about future risks, even among households projected to experience flooding. While risk information increases support for government spending on climate adaptation, it does not induce more support for costly individual actions. By contrast, communications about systemic, rather than individual, flooding risks can increase concern about future climate impacts among all coastal residents. Our results emphasize the complexities associated with overcoming the intertemporal welfare challenges posed by climate change.
“Measuring global concern about climate change with a dynamic, group-level item response theory model” (with Parrish Bergquist, Peter Howe, Anthony Leiserowitz, Jennifer Marlon, and Clara Vandeweerdt)
In December 2023, the world's leaders will meet in Dubai to assess the world's progress towards the goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Scholars have extensively discussed the complex and thorny geopolitics of this convening, but the micro-foundations of those geopolitics are poorly understood. This is due to the patchy availability of survey data concerning climate change around the world. In this paper, we present a comprehensive dataset estimating concern about climate change in 164 countries around the world, on a common scale. We describe our dataset of responses to 134 questions from 101 surveys measuring concern about climate change between 1998 and 2020. We then develop a group-level item-response-theory model to aggregate these data into a single latent-variable estimate of concern about climate change and support for policy to address it in each country represented in our dataset. We present preliminary results from this model, which we validate by comparing the model outputs to cross-sections of our underlying data. The estimates we present have the potential to open exciting new avenues for deepening scholarly understanding of the drivers of climate concern around the world.
“Process-tracing, counterfactual comparisons and causal inference”
Process tracing is now the dominant method used by qualitative political scientists. However, the nature of process-tracing remains the subject of substantial debate, including the mechanism through which the method supports causal inference-making. Here, I offer a methodological elaboration of process-tracing within the potential outcomes framework. Emphasizing the shared importance of counterfactual comparisons for both qualitative and quantitative inference, I argue qualitative scholars can also manage the Fundamental Problem of Causal Inference. While quantitative approaches to causal inference typically use statistical techniques to estimate group-level causal estimands, particularly causal effects, qualitative approaches can use process-tracing to make informed judgements about unit- level causal estimands, particularly causal mechanisms. Both approaches involve structured frameworks to estimate the value of unobserved counterfactual states of the world, and can be understood as achieving their causal inferential leverage by comparing realized outcomes with assumption-dependent representations of unrealized counterfactual outcomes. Accordingly, I conceptualize process-tracing as a tool to estimate bounds on unit-level counterfactual outcomes and describe how the method can mitigate common biases associated with counterfactual reasoning. In this account, qualitative causal inferences are generated by within-case analysis; correspondingly, qualitative research that draws from multiple cases should be understood as a form of empirical replication to generate conjectures about the scope conditions under which particular causal mechanisms realize. Acknowledging the implicit role of counterfactual reasoning in process-tracing can also increase the transparency and falsifiability of qualitative political science analysis.
“Survey sampling in the Global South using Facebook advertisements” (with Leah Rosenzweig, Parrish Bergquist, Katherine Hoffman Pham, and Francesco Rampazzo)
Survey research in the Global South traditionally requires large budgets and lengthy fieldwork, where researchers hire local enumerators to conduct face-to-face surveys with respondents. However, much of the world’s population is now digitally accessible, offering an opportunity for researchers with limited budgets and those seeking to study settings where in-person contact is impossible, such as during natural disasters, violent conflicts, and pandemics. In this paper, we evaluate whether Facebook advertising can be used to cost-effectively generate representative survey samples in the Global South. We introduce a framework for evaluating quality in Facebook survey samples, highlighting key trade-offs for researchers considering the platform. We then quota-sample respondents in two countries: Mexico (n=5,168) and Kenya (n=1,452) to evaluate how well these samples perform on a diverse set of survey indicators related to both internal and external validity. Overall, we find that while the Facebook platform can quite quickly and cheaply recruit respondents, these samples tend to be younger, more educated, and more urban than the overall national populations; however, Applying post-stratification weighting after oversampling key demographic variables ameliorates, though does not fully overcome, these initial sample imbalances. Overall, our analysis demonstrates the considerable potential of Facebook advertisements to cost-effectively conduct research in diverse global settings.
“The effect of environmental voter mobilization on turnout and environmental attitudes: Evidence from a field experiment in British Columbia, Canada” (with Geoffrey Henderson and Leah Stokes)
Environmental organizations play an active role in electoral politics, often working to turn their supporters out to the polls. Here, we evaluate how voter mobilization affects voter turnout and environmental attitudes among supporters of several Canadian environmental organizations. Using a field experiment during the May 2017 provincial election in British Columbia, we test the effects of two common types of get-out-the-vote (GOTV) conversations -- a tactical conversation focused exclusively on vote plan-making, and a ``deep canvassing" conversation that first engaged respondents in a personal discussion about environmentalism. Despite our target population being comprised of high-propensity voters, both GOTV interventions still appeared to increase voter turnout. At the same time, these GOTV interventions had divergent effects on environmental attitudes. While the tactical GOTV phone call decreased environmental issue salience, the issue-based GOTV call appeared to partially inoculate voters against this negative effect. We call for further research into the contexts and mechanisms that permit environmental canvassers to effect lasting attitudinal change during elections.
“Centering social and economic policies increases political support for climate reforms globally” (with Parrish Bergquist)
“Adaptation preferences and perceptions of responsibility in climate-vulnerable regions: Results from the first cross-national survey of small island states and territories” (with Paasha Mahdavi, Cesar Martinez-Alvarez, Sara Constantino, Gabe de Roche, Ingmar Sturm, Emma Franzblau)
“Cross-national patterns of climate opinion polarization” (with Parrish Bergquist and Emma Franzblau)
“Institutions and the illusion of apolitical climate policy” (with Matthew Lockwood)
“Material interest vs. partisan identity as drivers of opposition to carbon taxes” (with Alice Lépissier, Chloe Boutron, Erick Lachapelle and Kathryn Harrison)