Introduction

Article 22 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 9 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) require that parties recognize the right to social security, including social insurance. Realization of the right to social security is also a fundamental part of the mandate of the International Labor Organization (Cichon and Hagemejer 2007). General Comment 19 of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) notes:

Despite the widespread international acceptance of the ICESCR, the implementation of its obligations is reportedly quite poor. According to the CESCR, approximately 80% of the world's population lacks access to meaningful social security protection (CESCR 2008; ILO 2010). The gap between policy and implementation highlights the need for monitoring and reporting on the status and progressive realization of the right to social security.

A common explanation for environmental protection in advanced democracies is public awareness and concern about environmental problems. Virtually all studies cite, in one form or another, theemergence of environmental preferences among citizens as an important cause of action. According to such arguments, citizens perceive the environmental impact of industrial production as undesirable. Advances in the scientific understanding of the effects of human activity on the natural environment and recognition of the dependence of human society on environmental processes have also helped focus attention on environmental policy reforms. Greater scientific understanding has been ever more widely communicated via the news media, and increases in physical well-being since World War II have increased the salience of environmental protection on the political and social agenda.

Despite the research on increasing environmental concern and its causes, the relationship between mass attitudes and environmental outcomes in comparative politics remains virtually unexplored. This chapter attempts to address this oversight by investigating the relationship between the “mobilization of environmental bias” and environmental performance in advanced democracies. Drawing on several international opinion surveys and electoral data on environmental parties, I assess whether cross-national differences in aggregate support for environmental protection help us to explain cross-national differences in environmental performance in ways commonly assumed. Additionally, I investigate the extent to which cross-national differences in environmental mobilization are related to income. Then, the chapter more systematically evaluates the idea introduced in the preceding chapter that “environmental mobilization” is largely a product of income growth.

This book examines the success of seventeen Western nations in reducing environmental pollution since the early 1970s. Environmental conditions play an increasingly important role in the politics of advanced democracies. Increased human expansion has placed unprecedented strains on the resource base upon which the economy depends. Holes in the ozone layer, global warming, and the loss of biodiversity are only a few of the best-known problems connected with the environmental crisis. Also important are problems less global in scope, like acid rain or the disposal of wastes. Few dispute that historic trends in environmental degradation could hinder the ability to provide increasing levels of well-being into the next century. Current problems stem first and foremost from a failure to use natural resources effectively and from the implications of that failure on historic development paths.

The public has begun to recognize some of the environmental problems confronting the physical and economic sustainability of modern societies. Opinion polls since the 1960s show that large majorities in most economically advanced countries have consistently supported increased public action to ensure the protection of ecosystems and to reduce pollution. Policy makers have responded both to the growing evidence of long-term threats and growing public opposition to past practices by creating a variety of reforms to control environmental degradation. Today, most Western democracies have a wide array of measures to limit pollution and other forms of environmental degradation.

The seed for this book was planted in 1993 while I was working as a research assistant for Margaret McKean at Duke University. What was initially envisaged as a large-scale collaborative project on cross-national energy policy was narrowed into a dissertation investigating correlates of environmental performance among the advanced industrial democracies. When I arrived at the University of Connecticut in 1998, I put the just completed dissertation on a bookshelf and turned my attention to some other ideas. This was done on the advice of some senior colleagues, who suggested that the break would do me good. It was useful advice. Although I did look anxiously at the binder on my bookshelf a few times in the ensuing twelve months, the time off was refreshing. Ultimately, I think it has made the book a better one.

Meg McKean provided great encouragement and helpful criticism (and copious comments) throughout this project, particularly as it developed as my doctoral dissertation. I have not given (and probably cannot give) her enough credit. Others were also kind enough to read and comment on various aspects of the project along the way. David Vogel read a very early version of the manuscript. His comments provided great encouragement. Michael Skou Andersen, Pete Andrews, Peter Munk Christiansen, Robert Keohane, Michael Munger, Sonja Walti, and Albert Weale have all provided very intelligent and helpful advice.

This appendix briefly characterizes the degree of corporatism in environmental policy-making institutions that was summarized in Table 5.1. These descriptions should be taken as evidence demonstrating that national approaches to environmental policy resemble traditional approaches to policy making. Countries included in the environmental performance measures that do not have entries here are not covered due to a lack of data on their environmental policy institutions.

Austria (strong)

Austria has a long tradition of consensual policy making based on tripartite bargaining between peak economic interest organizations and the government in most major policy matters. The prevailing approach to environmental policy has also been one of cooperation and consensus seeking between the industry and labor confederations and the state. In its review of Austrian environmental performance, the OECD (1995a) noted that the regulatory instruments upon which Austrian environmental policy was constructed in the 1970s and 1980s were extensively negotiated with these social partners. There was also close cooperation between public authorities at all levels (federal, state, and local) and the private sector. Business and labor interests participate in official discussions in legislative process and in the chambers of commerce. A recent project report, the Joint Environmental Policy-Making Project, characterized Austria as having a “corporatist” policy-making style (JEP 1998).

One problem area in Austria has been the limited formal participation of environmental groups. The OECD, for example, suggested that such groups have been influential in particular cases but mainly as a result of protest rather than full incorporation into the process.

Historically, a major reason that previous work did not directly investigate environmental outcomes was the lack of data with which to make comparisons (Hoberg 1986; Strom and Swindell 1993; Vogel 1986). The statistical abstracts of most national governments have only recently included environmental data alongside the economic, social, and political data collected for decades. In a few countries, the amount of environmentaldata is impressive but often of rather limited duration and not comparable across countries. Evidence from a few countries over short periods may be useful for various purposes but does not permit the evaluation of existing explanations for long-term environmental outcomes within countries. The reason is that short-term fluctuations in economic, social, or environmental conditions may mask long-term trends of man-made environmental impacts. Still, the paucity of empirical studies of outcomes is puzzling, given the stakes involved. For instance, even in the United States the first major empirical work on political determinants of environmental outcomes was not published until the 1990s (Ringquist 1993).

The environmental data in this study come primarily from the OECD's Environmental Data Compendium. It represents the best source from which to ascertain general trends within and across countries in the OECD. This volume has been published biannually since 1985. The data are collected on the basis of a questionnaire coadministered with Eurostat and sent to the member states of the OECD. The compendium provides data on a variety of pollution issues common to OECD countries.

The two preceding chapters have shown that attitudes, economic structure, and wealth are insufficient, if not problematic, explanations of variations in environmental performance among advanced industrial democracies. This chapter and the next one discuss a crucial factor that mediates between structural or cultural characteristics of countries and national environmental performance: the institutional context. This chapter investigates the influence of institutions linking economic and policy actors and their impact on environmental policy. The subsequent chapter investigates the influence of more traditional political institutions on the ability of countries to provide environmental protection. As with other explanations of environmental politics, studies examining whether institutions matter do not deal with environmental outcomes in a direct manner. Doing so allows us to evaluate competing explanations more systematically.

Garrett and Lange (1996) provide an extensive theoretical treatment of the role that domestic institutions play in mediating exogenous changes in actors' preferences over economic policy. In seeking to explain the specific ways that “institutions matter,” they suggest that both the organization of socioeconomic interests (e.g., structure of trade unions and employer groups) and the formal political institutions of a country (e.g., electoral laws, separation of political powers) can strongly influence how nations adjust to a changing configuration of economic preferences.

Although their argument is developed around exogenous changes in the economy brought on by globalization, the model is general enough to be a useful way to conceptualize understanding how countries adjust to influences like the growth of environmental concern since the late 1960s.

This chapter examines the relationship between differences in national political institutions and differences in environmental performance. Unlike the preceding chapter, which addressed the implications of patterns of interest group influence on environmental outcomes under an assumption that environmental interests are on the policy agenda, here I deal directly with barriers to the articulation, aggregation, and representation of environmental interests in the political arena.

A major reason for caring about political institutions is their effect on democratic responsiveness. In Democracies (1984) and Patterns of Democracy (1999), Arend Lijphart suggested that differences in institutional practices used to translate citizen preferences into policy have an important role in explaining differences in national policies. The significance of political institutions in effecting social choices and outcomes has received considerable attention in comparative politics and political economy (e.g., Alt and Chrystal 1983; Huber and Stephens 2001; Knight 1992; Lijphart 1999; Persson and Tabellini 2000; Powell 1982). This includes environmental performance. In particular, political scientists have proposed a number of hypotheses about the relationship between varieties of democratic institutions and the ability of society to respond to “diffuse interests” such as environmental protection effectively (Vogel 1993).

Environmental protection can be generally classified as a diffuse benefit because the benefits to individuals from the provision of environmental protection are relatively small or uncertain. Such benefits tend to be underprovided because of collective action problems.

The paucity of studies in the comparative political economy literature that address environmental problems is somewhat surprising. First environmental protection is an important political issue. Since before the oil shocks of the 1970s, it has been one of the three most important social issues, often polling ahead of the traditional items of economic performance – growth, unemployment, and inflation. Second, environmental quality is a collective good that simultaneously affects human well-being and is intimately associated with economic production. The provision of collective economic “goods” (growth, low prices, full employment, etc.) is a common subject in comparative political economy, making the lack of attention to environmental outcomes all the more exceptional. Finally, the physical environment is a fundamental component of social risk that is a critical issue around which politics and economics interact.

Why does this oversight persist? There are several explanations. First, there has been a tendency to treat “environmental politics” (by both traditional political economists and by environmental policy specialists) as something that is fundamentally different from traditional political economy subject matter. The intellectual roots of environmental politics challenge much of the materialist and distributional consensus that is taken for granted in the study of contemporary political economy. For this reason, environmental policy has been consigned to a realm that is not very relevant to material welfare.

A second reason for the lack of attention to environmental issues comes from more serious and reasoned objections to the theories that placed environmental issues on the intellectual map.

The purpose of this appendix is to explain how particular missing endpoint values were estimated in Tables 2.1-2.6.

NOx and SOx

Missing values in 1975 were estimated based on average changes in the other countries in the period 1970–75 or 1975–80 (-1.9% for SOx in 1975 and -15.7% in 1970 and 18.7% for NOx). Missing values for 1970 were not considered for NOx because there were a large number of missing values (six) and no country (with data) experienced a decline in the period.

Waste

Values for Canada, Finland, and the Netherlands in 1975 were estimated based on the per capita growth in private consumption between 1975 and 1980 (Christiansen and Fischer 1999).

Denmark Data reported by the OECD for Danish waste generation in 1995 (560 kg/person) are based on a new estimation methodology and appear higher than the level reported for 1985 (480 kg/person). However, studies based on the new methodology (Andersen 1999a) indicate that waste generation fell considerably between 1987 and 1996 (due in part to a new waste tax enacted in the late 1980s and expanded in the early 1990s). The waste level reported for 1995 in Table 2.3 uses the old series (1985 value) as the base and the index of change (1987–96) calculated by Andersen. This produces a value for 1995 that is consistent with the rest of the series.

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom introduced both a new method of counting waste and a new aggregation unit in 1995.

In this chapter, I evaluate economic and structural explanations of national environmental performance. One of the most prominent explanations for differing commitments to environmental quality in the contemporary literature is national income and economic development. Conventional wisdom (and many studies) suggests that higher incomes increase people's attention to environmental problems and willingness to pay for environmental improvements (Baumol and Oates 1988; Grossman and Krueger 1995; Inglehart 1977, 1990; Jänicke 1992). Often associated with increased wealth are broader structural changes in the economy that, according to many, should reduce environmental pressures by shifting production and consumption away from pollution-intensive goods toward less polluting services. Without necessarily rejecting such explanations, others suggest that general physical and demographic features of a society help to explain differences in the salience of environmental performance and scope for better environmental quality (Cropper and Griffiths 1994; Kitschelt 1989).

These factors – national wealth, the structure of production, demographics, and geography – can all be considered structural explanations of environmental performance in the sense that they cannot be easily changed, or if they can be (as in the case of wealth or population density), they can change only very slowly. For instance, increasing population density is not a conscious strategy of trying to augment concern for the environment; and, practically speaking, there is little that a democratic country can do in the short run to alter its population density.

All too often, the results of statistical tests turn out to be fragile. That is, when one or two minor changes are made in the data or the variables in the model, originally compelling results turn out to be much less so. This issue is particularly critical in a comparative study such as this one, which relies on statistical analysis and a limited number of observations (Bernhard 1998; Bollen and Jackman 1985; Granato, Inglehart, and Leblang 1996; Jackman 1986; Western 1995). The previous chapter touched on one such problem in trying to adjudicate between competing empirically valid explanations for the same phenomenon. Given the general problems of measurement error in the concepts studied here and some of the particular problems with the environmental outcome data discussed in Chapter 2, demonstrating that the overall findings are “robust” lends them further validity.

Diagnosing influential observations

Bollen and Jackman note at the beginning of their article on influential cases in statistical analysis:

To illustrate how this can happen, consider the following example. Figure 7.1 is a scatterplot of two variables.