Who is driving Russian climate policy? Applying and adjusting veto players theory to a non-democracy

What is driving Russian climate policy? This article focuses on the veto player approach developed by George Tsebelis and its applicability for examining the power relations in climate change policy-making in Russia. It makes two original contributions: veto players analysis on Russian climate policy and proposals how to adjust to theory to be applied to non-democracies for comparison with democracies. After identifying the veto players and their preferences, and determining their equivalence in the decision-making process, two case studies are examined: the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol and the establishment of one of the Kyoto flexible mechanisms, Joint Implementation, in Russia. Regarding the power play between actors, the latter emerges as far more accessible than the former, where scholars can generally observe only the domestic debate—which, due to the absorption of democratic decision-making institutions by the president, is detached from the actual decision-making process. Three proposals are made for adjusting the veto players approach to facilitate qualitative analysis of Russian decision-making: (1) select cases which involve also lower-level actors in charge of policy implementation; (2) due to implementation problems, changes in the status quo must be sought deeper than in statute-level changes; and (3) note that motivations of actors beyond the actual policy substance can facilitate explanations of puzzling outcomes in the process.     

Vulnerable warriors: the atmospheric marketing of military and policing equipment before and after 9/11

In this article, we analyse changes in the circulation of advertisements of policing products at security expos between 1995 and 2013. While the initial aim of the research was to evidence shifts in terrorist frames in the marketing of policing equipment before and after 9/11, our findings instead suggested that what we are seeing is the rise of marketing to police as “vulnerable warriors”, law enforcement officers in need of military weapons both for their offensive capabilities and for the protection they can offer to a police force that is always under threat.     

Gender Differences in Initiation of Negotiation: Does the Gender of the Negotiation Counterpart Matter?

In this study, we investigated if and how gender differences in the propensity to initiate a negotiation are affected by the gender of the counterpart in the negotiation. We enlisted 204 Swedish students to take part in an experiment in which they had to decide whether to initiate a negotiation for higher compensation. In line with previous research, we found that men were more likely than women to initiate a negotiation: 42 percent of the male and 28 percent of the female participants initiated a negotiation. The gender difference, however, was only large and statistically significant when the negotiation counterpart was a woman. With a female negotiation counterpart, women were less likely than men to initiate a negotiation by 24 percentage points, while with a male negotiation counterpart, the gender difference was only 5 percentage points and not statistically significant. This result suggests that the gender of the negotiation counterpart should be taken into consideration when analyzing gender differences in initiation of negotiation.     

Berko Anat. The Path to Paradise,the Inner World of Suicide Bombers and Their Dispatchers. Forward by Moshe Addad,and translated by Elizabeth Yuval

This article conceptualizes political radicalization as a dimension of increasing extremity of beliefs, feelings, and behaviors in support of intergroup conflict and violence. Across individuals, groups, and mass publics, twelve mechanisms of radicalization are distinguished. For ten of these mechanisms, radicalization occurs in a context of group identification and reaction to perceived threat to the ingroup. The variety and strength of reactive mechanisms point to the need to understand radicalization—including the extremes of terrorism—as emerging more from the dynamics of intergroup conflict than from the vicissitudes of individual psychology.     

Hague Case Law: Latest Developments

Netherlands International Law Review -     

The Impact of the Philadelphia Beverage Tax on Prices and Product Availability

In recent years, numerous cities in the U.S. have enacted taxes on beverages to promote health and raise revenue. This paper examines the impact of Philadelphia's beverage tax, enacted in 2017, on the prices and availability of both taxed and untaxed beverages. Using original data we collected in late 2016 and again one year later, we estimate difference-in-differences regressions of the change over time in beverage prices and availability in stores in Philadelphia relative to stores in nearby counties. We find that, on average, distributors and retailers fully passed through the tax to consumers. Pass-through is higher for individual servings than for larger sizes. There is also heterogeneity in the pass-through rate among stores; it is greater among stores that are in higher-poverty neighborhoods, located farther from untaxed stores outside Philadelphia, and that are independent as opposed to part of national chains. We also find that the tax reduced the availability of taxed beverages and increased the availability of untaxed beverages, particularly bottled water, in Philadelphia stores.