Other Political Science Commons^™

Not Waiting For Washington: Climate Policy Adoption In California And New York, Roger Karapin

Publications and Research

In the absence of strong U.S. national climate change policy, California and New York, among other states, adopted relatively comprehensive and ambitious policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions during the 2000s. They adopted these policies despite political-institutional and other structural barriers similar to those found nationally, which shows that political actors have significant scope for taking effective action even under structural constraints. This article explains the adoption of climate policies in these two leading states by using a windows of opportunity approach, which analyzes how the convergence of problem and political events produces policy windows and hence opportunities for advocacy …

Framing The Question, "Who Governs The Internet?", Robert J. Domanski

Publications and Research

There remains a widespread perception among both the public and elements of academia that the Internet is “ungovernable”. However, this idea, as well as the notion that the Internet has become some type of cyber-libertarian utopia, is wholly inaccurate. Governments may certainly encounter tremendous difficulty in attempting to regulate the Internet, but numerous types of authority have nevertheless become pervasive. So who, then, governs the Internet? This book will contend that the Internet is, in fact, being governed, that it is being governed by specific and identifiable networks of policy actors, and that an argument can be made as to …

Theorizing More Inclusive Cities: A Relational Model Of Boundary Transformation And Urban Research Agenda, Leigh Graham

Publications and Research

To generate more inclusive environments for marginalized urban communities of color demands a strategy that privileges symbolic boundary change and uses it as the inroad towards spatial changes. This paper theorizes a three step relational process of a) communicative democratic activism, b) "multicultural" capital brokers providing access to the policy making process, and c) practices of community building that reflect the role of cities as key sites for sociospatial boundary transformation. An emphasis on discursive and ideational change, relying on communicative democratic processes steeped in historical, comparative analysis opens up our minds towards different classification schemes for stigmatized groups. Participating …

Greece In Crisis: An Interview With Despina Lalaki, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Explaining Success And Failure In Climate Policies: Developing Theory Through German Case Studies, Roger Karapin

Publications and Research

Theories of environmental outcomes have been developed mostly through large-N cross-national studies, which have a structuralist bias and do not include the mechanisms through which inferred causes operate. Structured, focused case studies can help overcome those limits by incorporating political processes and identifying causal mechanisms. Here, comparisons of climate policy outcomes within Germany are used to test and develop theory, by explaining the differences among nine cases with the help of process tracing. The findings suggest that environmental-outcome theories should be modified to include: external events and advocacy-coalition formation as key processes; multiple causal paths through which green parties improve …

Climate Policy Outcomes In Germany: Environmental Performance And Environmental Damage In Eleven Policy Areas, Roger Karapin

Publications and Research

Germany has reduced its emissions of greenhouse gases more than almost any other industrialized democracy and is exceeding its ambitious Kyoto commitment of a 21% reduction since 1990. Hence, it is commonly portrayed as a climate-policy success story, but the situation is much more complex. Generalizing Germany's per-capita emissions to all countries or its emissions reductions to all industrialized democracies would still very likely produce more than a two-degree rise in global temperature. Moreover, analyzing the German country-case into eleven subcases shows that it is a mixture of relative successes and failures.

This illustrates several major problems with the literature …

Protest And Reform In Asylum Policy: Citizen Initiatives Versus Asylum Seekers In German Municipalities, 1989-1994, Roger Karapin

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.