Excerpt

International Commitments and Domestic Opinion: The Effect of the Paris Agreement on Public Support for Policies to Address Climate Change. Dustin Tingley, January 2019, Paper, "The Paris Agreement marked a new turn in international environmental agreements, by allowing each country to set its own non-binding goals for emissions reductions. How might purely voluntary international commitments affect domestic support for costly policies to address climate change? We investigated this question by administering survey experiments in the U.S. Our experiments supported three conclusions. First, even voluntary international commitments transformed public opinion. Public support emissions control policies was much higher in scenarios where the U.S. government had joined the Paris Agreement than in scenarios where it had not. Second, voluntary commitments were most consequential in boosting support for policies that imposed intermediate costs on the public, while having smaller effects on policies involving low or high costs. Finally, our experiments exposed the dangers of promising too much (overpledging) or too little (underpledging). These findings have important implications for the design and consequences of international agreements." Link