“Pioneers but not guinea pigs”: experimenting with climate change adaptation in French coastal areas

Uncertainty surrounding climate change has encouraged policy makers to engage in flexible and exploratory policies and forms of policy making. The article examines the potential of experimentation in devising coastal adaptation policies, taking into account its political dimensions. We analysed a multi-level experiment, funded by the French Ministry for the Environment from 2012 to 2015, where coastal municipalities volunteered to simulate the implementation of planned retreat as an adaptation strategy. Using insights from discursive institutionalism, we tracked developments throughout the experiment period. We highlight a combined process of governance experiment, allowing social innovation at local and regional scales, and a more strategic tool for the state, governing and steering local coastal policy with new instruments. We shed light on a particular policy entrepreneur (a public organization dealing with coastal management) playing at the intersection of these two forms, and in the interplay of policy scales. Although the experiment contributed to the innovation of legal and economic instruments and produced policy feedbacks in local planning and governance, learning capacities of the multi-scale architecture are still moderate to make planned retreat a reality in the near future. The conclusion considers performative and interpretive effects of policy experiments as further research questions to explore.     

Exploring the Effective Authority of International Administrations from the League of Nations to the United Nations

This article analyses the concept of international administration by a multilateral organization through the lens of the effective authority of example missions, arguing that the United Nations Interim Administration of Kosovo (UNMIK) and the United Nations Transitional Administration of East Timor (UNTAET) are very specific and distinct attempts at statebuilding. The article’s main argument is that the two most-cited cases in the interwar years – the Saar Territory and the Free City of Danzig, as well as the international administration of West New Guinea by the United Nation (UN) – while presenting interesting parallels with and providing useful insights into the challenges faced by the contemporary international administrations of Kosovo and Timor-Leste, are in fact drastically different endeavours in terms of the effective authority exerted on the ground. The article builds on this special section’s contribution on authority building, analysing the five international administrations through the prism of claimed, recognized, and exercised authority.     

U.S. Child Safety Seat Laws: Are they Effective,and Who Complies?

This paper assesses the effectiveness of child safety seat laws in the United States. Over the past 35 years, these laws have steadily increased mandatory child safety seat restraint ages. We exploit state‐year level variation in the age until which children are required to ride in child safety seats to estimate triple difference models using Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data from 1975 to 2011. Our findings show that increasing the age thresholds is effective in increasing the actual age of children in safety seats. Across the child‐age distribution, restraint rates increase by between 10 and 30 percentage points or by between 50 and 170 percent, in the long run. We also estimate the impact of the child safety seat laws on the likelihood that a child dies in a fatal accident. We find that the laws saved up to 39 children per year. Finally, we find that the laws primarily induce compliant parents to switch from traditional seatbelt use to child safety seat use, with only small effects among parents who do not restrain their children.     

A theory of predatory welfare state and citizen welfare: the French case

Public Choice - In this paper, we argue that the welfare state is an outcome of modern mass (total) warfare. The total war economy requires the participation of all citizens, erasing the...     

Is All Politics Indeed Local? A Comparative Study of Dual Mandate‐Holders’ Role Attitudes and Behaviours in Parliament

The practice of dual mandate‐holding, i.e. the simultaneous occupation of a political mandate at the (sub)national and the local level, is understudied in the comparative literature. Dual mandate‐holders embody the most direct link between local and central government, yet research has disregarded whether these actors actually feel and act as local ambassadors in parliament. In this article, we study whether councillors in parliament feel responsive for local grievances in terms of their respective role attitudes and behaviour, using the PARTIREP Comparative MP Survey. The estimated regression models demonstrate that dual mandate‐holders indeed perceive themselves as local brokers, even when controlling for various systemic‐, party‐ and individual‐level factors. On the other hand, they struggle to translate their localized attitudes into localized parliamentary behaviour, which could call one of the main arguments in favour of dual mandate‐holding into question.     

The Morals and Order Exceptions in WTO Law: Balancing the Toothless Tiger and the Undermining Mole

On 10 April 2007, the United States requested consultationswith China regarding trading rights for publications and audiovisualproducts. Following US—Gambling, this case is likely toprovoke the next clash between free trade and public morals.This article takes an abstract approach to the scope and contentof the public morals and public order exceptions in the GATSand the GATT and, given the absence of a public order exceptionunder the GATT, analyzes how these two concepts interrelatewith one another. In this regard, the finding in US—Gamblingthat Members should individually define the scope of ArticleXIV(a) GATS is critically examined, but the article suggeststhat it deserves support based on an interpretation in accordancewith general principles of the law of treaties. Following theidentification of instruments that limit the risk for abuseof the morals and order exceptions, the article will turn tothe scope-related aspect regarding the justifiability of ‘extraterritorial’measures.     

National Judges,Community Judges: Invitation to a Journey through the Looking‐glass—On the Need for Jurisdictions to Rethink the Inter‐systemic Relations beyond the Hierarchical Principle

The historical conflict between the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the national constitutional courts regarding primacy is a misunderstanding. In going through the looking‐glass, we can understand that, on the contrary, the ECJ and the national constitutional courts adopt comparable solutions in their treatment of legal pluralism, and that they see the negation of pluralism as essential for the survival of their own legal orders. Therefore, these judges must be offered a new theoretical context to help them reconcile their role as supreme guardian with the taking into account of the pluralist context. Finally, practical proposals must be made to give judges the instruments and techniques that are capable of reflecting this plural structure.     

‘A Fair Day’s Wage for a Fair Day’s Work’? Exploring the connection between the parliamentary work of MPs and their electoral support

Electoral systems across Europe increasingly invite candidates to build up a personal reputation to earn votes. In this article, we investigate whether parliamentary work can be considered as a personal vote-earning attribute for incumbent MPs based on data of the 2014 elections in Belgium. The results show that when parliamentary work is operationalised in a narrow way (i.e. as the number of bills and the number of oral and written questions of an MP), this has no influence on the amount of preferential votes. When parliamentary work is defined in a broader way (i.e. also including other aspects of the legislative and control function of MPs), parliamentary work has a significant positive effect for MPs from opposition parties. This supports the claim that the number of legislative and control activities is not sufficient to measure the impact of parliamentary work on preferential votes, but that also other aspects of the work should be taken into account.