infonet-economy

On oppression: Animals, the absent referent

Turning the Paris Agreement's greenhouse gas emissions pledges into domestic policies is the next challenge for governments. We address the question of the acceptability of cost-effective climate policy in a real-voting setting. First, we analyze voting behavior in a large ballot on energy taxes, rejected in Switzerland in 2015 by more than 2 million people. Energy taxes were…

Traditional corporatist groups such as business groups and unions still play an important role in many countries, and the rumors exaggerates the decline of corporatist structures. Nevertheless citizen groups have grown in number and political importance. We show that Danish and Swiss citizen groups have gained better access to the administrative and the parliamentary venues in the…

Using data from the European Social Survey (2002-14), this paper explores the effect of union membership on support for redistribution. We hypothesize that the wage-bargaining practices of unions promote egalitarian distributive norms, which lead union members to support redistribution, and that this effect is strongest among high-wage workers. Consistent with our expectations, the…

In this paper we analyse the extent to which perceptions of the government’s role in the economic crisis impacted on the political behaviour of European citizens. This includes contentious political activities such as attending public meetings, participating in demonstrations, and joining strikes, but also electoral behaviour in the form of voting against the incumbent. We examine…

The Institutional Resource Regime framework appears successful in comparing natural resource governance systems but unable to provide a common and persuasive explanation of the evolution of these systems. To fill this gap, the concepts of institutional complexity trap and transversal transaction costs (TTC) have been recently put forward. IRRs tend to fall into an institutional…

In this paper, my primary goal is to test if vote conversion is in line with voters' perceptions of parties' competence, i.e. if the competence change in favor of a party during the political campaign triggers vote conversion in favor of this same party. Then, I assess the moderating role of saliency and political knowledge and the difference between ‘valence' and…

The destabilization of Eastern Europe and of the Southern Mediterranean has exposed the limits of the European peace project. Obviously, the European Neighbourhood Policy has not succeeded in boosting peace and prosperity. This article attributes this failure to a combination of functionalist hubris and political myopia that emanates from the European Union's peculiar…

Labour standards are one of the most contested issues in economic relations between developed countries and emerging markets. As attempts to codify such standards in the WTO have failed, the EU and the US have intensified their efforts to promote them in bilateral and regional Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). Whereas this practice has been quite consistent across the globe, the…