By: William P. Jaeger Colorado Children's Campaign, Jeffrey Lyons Boise State University, Jennifer Wolak �鶹ӰԺ

Published: July 10, 2016

Abstract:

Political knowledge is central to the success of representative democracy. However, public policy has been shown to follow public opinion even despite low levels of political information in the electorate. Does this mean that political knowledge is irrelevant to policy representation? We consider whether knowledgeable electorates are better able to achieve representative policy outcomes. Using the heterogeneity in the responsiveness of government across the states, we consider how state political knowledge moderates the connection between citizen ideology and the policy outcomes of state government. Using national surveys and multilevel logit with post-stratification, we develop measures of collective political knowledge in the states. We test whether knowledgeable electorates are more likely to secure representative political outcomes than less politically informed constituencies. We find that as state political knowledge increases, so does the correspondence between the preferences of the public and the ideological tenor of state policy outcomes.

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Wolak J. PUBLIUS-THE JOURNAL OF FEDERALISM. 46 (4) (September 01, 2016): 463-485.

Abstract:
Why do people call for states’ rights and the devolution of national authority? Are they driven by partisan motives, where they like devolution the most when the President is of the opposing party? Or are calls to shift the balance of federal power rooted in sincere support for decentralized political authority? Using survey data from 1987 to 2012, I explore how support for devolution varies across time and individuals. I find that people are not strictly partisan in how they think about devolution. While people are more likely to favor decentralization when the President is of the opposing party, they are no more likely to want devolution when their own party controls state government. Substantive considerations are also important, where those who support limited government increasingly favor the devolution of central authority as the size of the national government increases relative to the size of state and local government.

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Vanderheiden S. ETHICAL THEORY AND MORAL PRACTICE. 19 (2) (April 01, 2016): 297-311.

Abstract:
Contemporary persons are daily confronted with enormous quantities of information, some of which reveal causal connections between their actions and harm that is visited upon distant others. Given their limited cognitive and information processing capacities, persons cannot reasonably be expected to respond to every cry for help or call to action, but neither can they defensibly refuse to hear and reflect upon any of them. Persons have a limited obligation to know, I argue, which requires that they inform themselves and others about their role in harmful social practices, with a view toward challenging the norms that sustain such practices. In this paper, I explore this obligation to know, and the related idea of excusable ignorance, offering accounts of the epistemic burden that it entails for persons in their capacities as citizens and in the context of global climate change and of reproach as a potentially effective tool for rectifying rather than excusing ignorance.

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Vanderheiden S.  Sci Eng Ethics (November 29, 2016).

Abstract:
Scholars concerned with abuses of the ‘‘resource privilege’’ by the governments of developing states sometimes call for national sovereignty over the natural resources that lie within its borders. While such claims may resist a key driver of the ‘‘resource curse’’ when applied to mineral resources in the ground, and are often recognized as among a people’s territorial rights, their implications differ in the context of climate change, where they are invoked on behalf of a right to extract and combust fossil fuels that is set in opposition to global climate change mitigation imperatives. Moreover, granting full national sovereignty over territorial carbon sinks may conflict with commitments to equity in the sharing of national mitigation burdens, since much of the �鶹ӰԺ carbon sink capacity lies within territorial borders to which peoples have widely disparate access. In this paper, I shall explore this tension between a global justice principle that is often applied to mineral resources and its tension with contrary principles that are often applied to carbon sink access, developing an analysis that seeks to reconcile what would otherwise appear to be fundamentally incompatible aims.

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Vanderheiden S. Midwest Studies In Philosophy. 40 (1) (September 2016): 27-42.

Abstract:
Climate justice scholars have in recent years devoted considerable attention to the development and application of justice principles and frameworks to the architecture of global climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. The resulting scholarly literature is now rife with burden-sharing or resource-sharing mitigation prescriptions that call for far more aggressive actions than are ever considered as viable policy options, along with proposals for singular or hybrid principles for assigning adaptation liability that follow sound normative analyses but have gained little traction among policymakers (Gardiner ; Harris ; Moellendorf ; Vanderheiden ). With their gaze fixed primarily upon macro-level substantive policy outcomes, scholars have paid less attention to the way that justice might be applied at other levels of analysis and operationalized through the institutions of international climate policy development and implementation.

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Vanderheiden S. JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY. 13 (1) (January 01, 2016): 1-27.

Abstract:
Does the receipt of benefits from some common resource create an obligation to contribute toward its maintenance? If so, what is the basis of this obligation? I consider whether individual contributions to climate change can be impugned as wrongful free riding upon the stability of the planet's climate system, when persons enjoy its benefits but refuse to bear their share of its maintenance costs. Two main arguments will be advanced: the first urges further modification of H.L.A. Hart’s “principle of fairness” as the basis for demanding that would-be free riders pay their fair share in the context of climate change, while the second claims that remedial action on climate change is better captured through collective action analysis than through harm principles that seek to connect individual actions to bad environmental outcomes.

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VANDERHEIDEN SJ. Taiwan Human Rights Journal. 3 (3) (2016): 3-26.

Abstract:
Among the challenges posed by human-caused climate change are issues of justice and democracy, in how the environmental problem is expected to affect human social and economic systems and in the response taken by states and the international community to mitigate the problem. While unmitigated climate change unjustly harms the most vulnerable and widens existing unjust inequalities, programs to mitigate climate change can also be just or unjust, and so must take pains to avoid the latter. Likewise with democracy, as the failure to adequately respond to climate change may intensify scarcity and in so doing undermine new or established democracies, and cooperative efforts to control climate change are likely to be more responsive to the interests of the many if they are informed by democratic ideals and principles. Both sets of issues can constructively be theorized in terms of human rights, which seek to guarantee human interests in a safe and sustainable environment as well as those to self-determination and popular participation in major decisions that shape social and economic life, and which help to link the demands of justice and democracy in common cause. Here, I shall examine several such issues of justice and democracy, in the contexts of both domestic and international climate change governance, grounding these imperatives where appropriate in a human rights framework.

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TIR J, Bailey M. Conflict Management and Peace Science (2016).

Abstract:
Why is the economic status of women better in one country than another? We maintain that the answer lies in part in the extent of external threat to the homeland territory a country faces. Our project furthers the research showing that the undesirable effects of interstate territorial conflict extend to domestic politics of countries involved by arguing that the presence of territorial threat also negatively impacts the economic welfare of women. To respond to the threat, states tend to centralize their decision-making, invest more in the military, and decrease citizens’ liberties. Associated restrictions and emphases on more “masculine” values create an environment where women’s welfare takes a back seat to the ostensible priority of defending the homeland. Utilizing measures of women’s unemployment, our analyses over the 1981-2001 period demonstrate that higher levels of territorial threat decrease women’s economic welfare. This extends both the research into pernicious effects of territorial conflict and qualifies the finding from gender research that women’s economic situation typically improves during the times of war as women take over jobs from the male population that is at the front.
 

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MCCABE JT, Linke A, O'Loughlin J, Tir J, Witmer F. Journal of Colflict Resolution (December 15, 2016).

Abstract:
Two questions on the effects of climate change for social instability are addressed. First, do droughts and their associated environmental impacts affect support for the use of violence? Second, do local level formal and informal institutions moderate support for violence where droughts become worse? To answer these questions a national survey of 1,400 Kenyans was conducted in 2014. Respondents were asked about patterns of rainfall and the presence of rules regulating natural resource use and access. Survey data are joined to spatially disaggregated observed rainfall trends. The survey uses endorsement experiments to elicit honest responses about support for using violence. There is some evidence of a direct link between reported and observed drought and violent attitudes, though it is limited. The analysis suggests that certain local-level natural resource use rules have moderating and dampening effects on support for violence where drought is reported and precipitation is less frequent. This conditional and contextual effect is an important modification of overly simplistic narratives of climate change effects.

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Strayhorn JA, Carrubba CJ, Giles MW.  JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL POLITICS. 28 (3) (July 01, 2016): 431-460.

Abstract:
In a principal–agent relationship, how should principals budget time for oversight when oversight activity is not instantaneous? We develop a formal model of resource allocation by a principal monitoring multiple agents, where the principal faces a dynamic budgeting problem. Our model reveals a tension between the value of holding resources in reserve to maintain the threat of an audit and the direct policy gains of monitoring activity. We show that as the frequency of principal–agent conflict increases, there are some conditions under which the most effective strategy for a principal is to allocate less and less of their total time to monitoring. The model has important implications for the empirical analysis of a monitoring setting where a principal oversees multiple agents.

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