Is Co-decision Good for the Environment? An Analysis of the European Parliament's Green Credentials

The European Parliament (EP) has long been regarded as a positive force for environmental change in the EU, but there has been little detailed empirical scrutiny to determine whether its reputation as a green champion is deserved. Nor has there been any evaluation of the environmental impact of the increase in EP powers under co-decision. These oversights are rectified by an evaluation of the EP's amendments to environmental legislation using typologies that rank them in terms of their level of ecological commitment and importance. EP amendments proposed under three procedures of decision making are compared in order to determine whether recent increases in the EP's powers under the co-decision procedure have affected its ability and willingness to adopt 'green' amendments. It is clear that the EP has consistently tried to strengthen environmental legislation but there is some ambiguity as to whether co-decision has been good for the environment.     

The End of Sprawl? Not so Fast

This article takes a careful look at the recent state of sprawl among America’s 178 largest metropolitan areas through the lens of four sets of questions: (a) Measured at the metropolitan level, is sprawl really declining? Is it declining everywhere, or just in selected metropolitan areas? (b) If sprawl is indeed declining, are more compact growth forms on the rise? (c) If sprawl is indeed declining, is it the result of antisprawl land use and development policies? (d) Which metropolitan-level land market, demographic, and economic factors are most associated with changes in sprawl? It concludes that sprawl is indeed declining when measured by average population densities, but that the decline has been much less widespread if measured in terms of population growth in core-area neighborhoods, changing density gradient intercept and slope estimates, and increased employment clustering. In terms of policy, it finds no evidence that local regulatory regimes or growth management programs have had any effect on sprawl, but finds that the consistent administration of local regulatory programs in ways that incentivize infill development and send consistent signals to developers does contribute to reduced sprawl.     

Is tolerance good or bad for growth?

We investigate how tolerance, as measured by attitudes toward different types of neighbors, affects economic growth in a sample of 54 countries. Unlike previous studies, by Richard Florida and others, we find that tolerance toward homosexuals is negatively related to growth. For tolerance toward people of a different race, we do not find robust results, but the sign of the estimated coefficients is positive, suggesting that inclusion of people irrespective of race makes good use of productive capacity. We propose mechanisms to explain these divergent findings, which clarify why different kinds of tolerance may be of different economic importance.     

Is It Finally Time for Space Tourism?

To date, only four paying space tourists have flown, and the prospect for broad, sustainable space tourism remains a dream. This article notes that there are two types of tourists conflated by the advocates of space tourism. The first are a tiny group of adventurers with significant wealth and other resources who seek thrills and bragging rights. They have enjoyed success in using government-owned resources for their extreme tourism experience by flying on Soyuz capsules operated by Russia, and the International Space Station owned and operated by a consortium of nations as a major research station. The second group seeks more modest excursions with a minimum of risk and a smaller price tag. Only the first group has much prospect for tourism in space in the foreseeable future, but the second group is the more important, and expanding its space tourism opportunities represents the primary means of achieving the goal of opening space to the public. This article also differentiates between private sector suborbital space tourism, which may achieve reality within the next five to seven years, and the prospects for orbital space tourism, which are at least an order of magnitude more difficult and will probably require at least another generation of technological work to achieve.     

Is Multiculturalism Bad for Social Cohesion and Redistribution?

Multiculturalism as an official policy strategy has recently come in for significant criticism in a number of Western European countries. A key criticism is that multicultural policies undermine redistribution policies, since they would erode the social cohesion upon which redistribution measures are built. However, empirical research does not univocally confirm this critique. This article explains why this is the case. The first argument is called the integration‐recognition paradox. Policies that focus on recognising minority groups may lead to a greater social acceptance of those minorities, and in turn may lead to their feeling more appreciated as participants in society. In a second argument, the authors discuss how multicultural policies could easily be combined with policies that invest in national unity and social cohesion.     

Is there a friends-and-neighbors effect for party leaders?

The friends-and-neighbors effect, which refers to voters' tendency to support politicians near hometown areas, has not yet been tested systematically for party leaders. Linking a built-for-purpose dataset on 266 leaders to a sample of 380,208 voters from 50 country elections in 19 parliamentary democracies drawn from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project, this article examines the effect of party leaders' local proximity on voters' leader evaluations and voting intentions. I hypothesize that leaders receive more positive evaluations and electoral support from voters in the district where they run for election. The results show that shared district increases voters' sympathy for leaders and their inclination to vote for the party of ‘near’ leaders. While the location of party leaders affects voters in all electoral systems, I find that the friends-and-neighbors effect on leader evaluations and party vote choice is stronger in systems with personalized, preferential and combined ballots.     

The Observer: Good at Observing, Less Good at Influencing?

The 1997 British General Election appeared to show a clear-cut case of the media influencing electoral behaviour. In an attempt to facilitate anti-Conservative tactical voting The Observer published the results of 16 constituency-level opinion polls. The newspaper is frequently seen as influential in determining the outcome in certain seats, where several high-profile members of the then Conservative government were defeated. In fact The Observer appears to have had very little impact in the seats it covered. Higher levels of tactical voting occured in few of these constituencies than in comparable seats elsewhere, and changes in the share of the vote consistent with the paper influencing the outcome are even rarer. In just one of the 16 seats covered by the paper is there prima facie evidence of the claimed effect.     

Against Localism: Does Decentralising Power to Communities Fail Minorities?

The continued decline in levels of political engagement among British citizens has led many politicians, commentators and academics from across the political spectrum to advocate a move toward a more direct form of democracy via some kind of localism. The claim is that citizens feel increasingly estranged from the democratic process, and from those organisations on which they have historically relied to represent them within the political system. Consequently, localists argue, there now exists a gap between the people, the institutions which are supposed to work on their behalf, and the decisions made in their name, so the system needs to be reformed in such a way as to give individuals and local communities more of a direct input into the decision-making process. Calls for a more direct form of democracy via localism are popular among members of the progressive left and the 'new Conservative' right, and have become so dominant in political discourse that it is often suggested that 'we are all localists now'. This article raises questions about the localist agenda, and suggests that the adoption of a more direct form of democracy in Britain may not only fail to address the decline in political engagement, but may also result in the exclusion, marginalisation, and oppression of minority groups.     

It’s Good but Is It Right? An Under-the-Hood View of the Location Affordability Index

In 2012, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released the Location Affordability Index (LAI) as an online portal and downloadable data set. The LAI has elevated the U.S. conversation on affordability to include transportation and access to opportunities, and has been used in state and federal programming, by researchers, and by private households. However, although some researchers have noted concerns with and potential limitations of the data, none has provided practitioners and researchers with an under-the-hood view of the data, analysis of its reliability or validity, or its conceptual limitations. This article recommends methodological improvements dealing with issues of variable construction, aggregation, and modeling. A recreation of the LAI at the census-tract level suggests the LAI overestimates both costs and cost burden, but especially among renters, and especially in metropolitan areas. On the transportation side, model recreation requires partnership and resourcing to both gain access to restricted data and to develop a reliable database on transit supply and use.     

Is Partial-Dimension Convergence a Problem for Inferences from MCMC Algorithms?

e-mail: jgill{at}wustl.edu Increasingly, political science researchers are turning to Markovchain Monte Carlo methods to solve inferential problems withcomplex models and problematic data. This is an enormously powerfulset of tools based on replacing difficult or impossible analyticalwork with simulated empirical draws from the distributions ofinterest. Although practitioners are generally aware of theimportance of convergence of the Markov chain, many are notfully aware of the difficulties in fully assessing convergenceacross multiple dimensions. In most applied circumstances, everyparameter dimension must be converged for the others to converge.The usual culprit is slow mixing of the Markov chain and thereforeslow convergence towards the target distribution. This workdemonstrates the partial convergence problem for the two dominantalgorithms and illustrates these issues with empirical examples.     

US-China Trade War: Is Winter Coming for Global Trade?

Journal of Chinese Political Science - This paper uses the SMART Model to analyze the direct economic effects of the US-China tariff war on both China and the US. Based on the three lists of...