Populists’ ideological opposition to global governance is well recognized, yet whether and how these actors systematically undermine international organizations remains unclear. We argue that a key means by which populists warp global governance is by distorting scientific information, which is necessary for global responses to many public health and environmental issues. Populists are motivated to withhold or misreport scientific information due to their anti-elite, pro-state sovereignty views. Using new data on the source and quality of information provided to IOs, we find that populist leaders are significantly less likely to provide scientific information to these organizations than other types of leaders. When they do offer such data, it is less accurate than the information supplied by other sources. Our findings suggest that populism may stymie international institutions’ ability to govern in areas of pressing international concern.

Climate change and decarbonization will impose costs on a range of industries, but in ways that are difficult to predict. I argue that the racial makeup of an industry serves as a heuristic by which communities evaluate its viability in contexts of deep uncertainty. In surveys of diverse samples of the U.S. public, I randomize the racial compositions of hypothetical industry workforces. I find that individuals are more pessimistic about industries that draw workers from marginalized racial groups, expecting those industries to be denied government support as climate-related stressors manifest. Individuals are more confident in industries tied to privileged groups, believing politicians will more readily come to their aid when called upon. These findings illustrate how racial divisions shape mass climate politics and suggest that group hierarchies serve as a touchstone for evaluating economic risk in uncertain settings.

International organizations (IOs) are rapidly reorienting around climate change, despite powerful principal states having divergent preferences on the issue. When and why do IOs prioritize climate change? We argue that they do so as a result of an endogenous process of staff learning and rotation. IO staff surveil and implement programs in target states. When working in climate-vulnerable countries, they come to see climate change as an issue warranting aggressive action. As these staff are rotated and promoted, interest in climate diffuses outwards and upwards through the institution. To test this theory, we introduce original data tracking the International Monetary Fund's attention to climate change and the career paths of key staff. We complement this with interviews of International Monetary Fund personnel. We find support for our theory.

What are the legacies of violence on women's political representation? This article examines the long-term effects of a watershed conflict of the twentieth century: the Khmer Rouge genocide, during which 50–70 percent of Cambodia's working-age men were killed. Using original data on mass killings and economic and political conditions in Cambodian communes, the authors find that genocide exposure is positively associated with women's economic advancement and current-day indicators of women's representation in local-level elected office. The authors conduct in-depth, ethnographic interviews with genocide survivors to explore the mechanisms by which violence spurred women into elected office. A crucial finding emerges: In areas that suffered the genocide's worst killings, widows obtained economic autonomy, providing a template for the economic advancement of women in traditional households with surviving men. The shift in norms regarding the sexual division of labor and its transmission through intracommunal and intergenerational pathways allowed women to adopt larger public roles over time in communities more exposed to genocide violence.

Coethnics often work in the same industries. How does this ethnic clustering affect individuals’ political loyalties amid industrial growth and decline? Focusing on migrant groups, the author contends that ethnic groups’ distribution across industries alters the political allegiances of their members. When a group is concentrated in a growing industry, economic optimism and resources flow between coethnics, bolstering migrants’ confidence in their economic security and dissuading investments in local political incorporation. When a group is concentrated in a declining industry, these gains dissipate, leading migrants to integrate into out-groups with greater access to political rents. Analyses of immigrants near US coal mines in the early twentieth century support this theory. The article shows how ethnic groups’ distribution across industries shapes the evolution of group cleavages and illuminates how decarbonizing transitions away from fossil fuels may reshape identity conflicts.

How do democratic transitions affect trade policy? A well-known finding is that transitions in developing countries produce lower tariff rates. But prior work implicitly assumes that all forms of democratic transitions are alike. There is less reason to expect trade liberalization to follow transitions led by political elites, which constitute roughly half of all democratic transitions in recent decades. Analysis of industry-level tariff rates indicates that elite-led transitions are not consistently followed by trade liberalization, while transitions initiated by the general public are associated with tariff rate reductions.

Industries with skewed gender makeups are vulnerable to globalization, decarbonization, and other drivers of economic disruption. We study how decline in disproportionately male industries, such as coal and steel, affects electoral outcomes. We theorize that an uneven loss of male jobs, and a shift in income from husbands to wives, can give rise to “nostalgic” coalitions of men and women that seek a return to patriarchal divisions of labor within households. Such attitudes fuel right-wing movements that pledge to protect traditional gender roles. This theory is supported with data on local labor markets and electoral outcomes in the United States over the last two decades, as well as a longitudinal study tracking individual Americans over four decades. This paper offers a new gender-based account of the globalization backlash and shows how within-household status concerns moderate responses to economic dislocation.

Contemporary climate governance rests on voluntary pledges made by states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Given the lack of formal enforcement mechanisms and limitations of naming and shaming, what weight do these pledges carry? We argue that independent of interest group pressure and transnational shaming, public distaste for backing down from treaty commitments dissuades defection. Emissions targets establish easily interpretable benchmarks, creating a salient cleavage between politicians who adhere to versus defect from them. This allows voters to better distinguish between politicians and electorally sanction those offering policies discordant with climate pledges. Conjoint and vignette experiments fielded in the U.S. suggest that candidates who deemphasize climate pledges lose votes in Democratic primaries and general elections. Analysis of U.S. cable news media supports the intuition that emissions targets have simplified popular climate discourse. These findings illustrate the potential electoral weight of international climate commitments.

Climate change represents one of the greatest policy challenges confronting governments around the world today. Yet relatively little is known about the determinants of citizens’ political action on climate change. What are the determinants of individual- and group-based political mobilization on climate change in rapidly industrializing economies? Survey evidence suggests that most citizens in developing countries agree that climate change is occurring and adversely affecting human lives and livelihoods. Yet political mobilization on climate change remains limited. Climate features low on the list of concerns motivating voting or political action. Consequently, elected representatives in developing countries face little bottom-up pressure to act adequately on climate change.

We theorize that hurdles to climate mobilization can be overcome via humanized testimonials about present-day climate impacts, delivered via in-person canvassing campaigns. Work in psychology indicates that vivid, visceral pieces of information can prompt substantial shifts in individuals’ attitudes. Recent experimental scholarship, moreover, points to the power of “perspective-taking” interventions in eroding social animosities and fostering empathy with vulnerable outgroups. Humanized testimonials can augment public concern about climate and voters’ likelihood of pressuring elected officials on the issue. Testimonials should have these effects by modifying beliefs about the material impacts of climate change and by fostering greater non-material empathy with the victims of climate change. Climate action is complicated by short time horizons, which de-emphasize long-run climate impacts, and uncertainty over an individual’s climate vulnerability. Personal testimonials help resolve both challenges. Discussion of present-day climate disruptions, first, accelerates the perceived timeline of climate impacts, vividly depicting the implications of climate change for livelihoods. Testimonials moreover clarify what climate change portends for individual communities or for people in certain lines of work, illuminating the material stakes of the issue for viewers.

This paper evaluates a scalable field intervention intended to test this theory. The core intervention in the study is the distribution of humanized testimonials on climate impacts through in-person canvassing campaigns. Our study is situated in two Indian states that vary in their ethnolinguistic makeup and climate vulnerability profiles. Working alongside a climate-focused NGO, we show randomly selected groups of subjects videotaped testimonials from fellow residents of their home state and other states in India. These testimonials offer true accounts of climate change impacts, and are produced by in collaboration with our NGO partner. We then evaluate whether being shown such “humanized” information increases individual support for government climate action and willingness to pressure local politicians accordingly. The core intervention in this study demonstrates how these strategies can prompt individuals to take meaningful action on climate unilaterally and in coordination with other community members, even in the presence of significant headwinds to mass climate mobilization.

Women are typically more supportive of climate action than men. However, in fossil fuel communities, women align with men in resisting decarbonization. How can we make sense of this? We argue that differences in post-carbon economic opportunity explain variation in women's support for decarbonization. In areas reliant on fossil fuel industries intensive in low-skilled male labor, communities underinvest in education and gender-equitable welfare. This leaves women without the skills or time needed to find gainful employment as husbands in fossil fuel industries lose work, diminishing the appeal of decarbonization. Where investments of this sort are made, women are better able to find well-paying jobs as fossil fuel industries decline, increasing the appeal of the post-carbon economy. Men, who often see their social status as tied to the survival of local fossil fuel industries, are less swayed by changes in post-carbon economic opportunity. To support this argument, we combine local labor market data with original survey experiments fielded in coal, oil, and gas communities across the United States. Our findings shed light on the makeup of climate coalitions in advanced economies and highlight the importance of centering gender in just transition policymaking.

Climate policymaking requires governments to have access to climate experts: individuals with specialized knowledge of decarbonization and physical climate science. In this paper, we model the quality of climate policymaking as a function of a competition between government regulators and the private sector for a scarce pool of climate experts. Regulators seek experts to develop and enforce effective climate policies. Firms seek experts to affect the design of those regulations and skirt enforcement, as well as to measure climate-related risks to their commercial interests. We argue that as private sector interest in climate grows, the government's ability to attract and retain climate experts declines, eroding its regulatory capacity. To offer support for this argument, we identify shocks to private sector demand for climate experts via rich data on U.S. private sector job postings and individual-level career paths, which we then pair with administrative data on bureaucrats at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Our findings offer a novel labor-based account of the nature of climate policymaking, contributing to the study of labor markets in political science, the literature on the quality of government bureaucracies, and debates on the net effect of corporate social responsibility.