Research

Working Papers:

Explaining National Variation in Climate Change Mitigation
Draft

In this paper, I argue that variation in national climate change mitigation can be explained by states pursuing their national interests while strategically constrained by the collective action problem. Specifically, state costs and benefits interacted with state size, a proxy for invulnerability to free-riding, strongly predict observed variation in national yearly emissions. I derive this hypothesis and connect it to extant literature with a theoretical framework that interrelates state climate change mitigation interests, preferences, behaviors, and outcomes. I test the hypothesis by predicting the difference between real emissions changes and a novel estimate for counterfactual emissions changes. The theoretical framework and the counterfactual estimation methodology developed in this paper will facilitate future work on climate mitigation politics, from both international and domestic politics approaches.

Income-Based Preferences for Local versus Global Environmental Goods: Evidence from Italy
with Simone Paci

Despite observed variation in the environmental preferences of individuals and organizations, the determinants of environmentalism are not well understood. We introduce a novel theoretical distinction between preferences for local and global environmental goods. This conceptual innovation is increasingly salient as demand for addressing climate change at the global level is balanced with demand for local environmental protection. We hypothesize that income is a key mediator for explaining differences between local and global environmentalism. Actors with higher incomes have greater mobility, lessening their vulnerability to local environmental harms and increasing their relative propensity for global environmental goods. We directly test the effects of mobility and other subcomponents of income, such as education and risk aversion, on general environmental preferences and on the relative strength of local versus global environmental preferences. We thus clarify the relationship between income and environmentalism by isolating multiple mechanisms of income?s effects and measuring heterogeneous effects on different types of environmentalism. Our theoretical innovations are supported by analysis of extensive public opinion data from modern Italy. Leveraging the geographic granularity and specificity of this dataset, we use a multilevel model to flexibly adjust for location-specific effects. This approach controls for the confounding effect of exposure to environmental harm.

Lobbying Implications of Property-Based Chemical Regulation
with Kinnari M. Shah

Work in Progress:

An Institutional Regime-Type Theory of Environmental Preferences

This paper develops a novel theory of environmental preferences by regime type by describing variation in state selectorates. First, states with large selectorates will be more motivated to supply environmental public goods. This prediction is analogous to a democracy-autocracy distinction, which has received extensive treatment in the literature on environmental goods provision, but which has also been challenged by scholarship arguing for authoritarian effectiveness. Second, states with long-time horizon selectorates will be more motivated to supply environmental public goods, which are traditionally conceived of as long-term goods. Length of selectorate time horizons may be reducible both to selectorate wealth and education levels, as in the environmental Kuznets curve literature, and to the structurally-determined temporal stability of selectorate power. By dividing regime type along two axes, I follow recent scholarship that disaggregates both democratic and authoritarian regimes into granular and useful types. I support my theory with a cross-national quantitative analysis and a case study of environmental conservation policy in Nepal.

Evaluating Environmental Treaty Effectiveness