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Since introducing a path-breaking carbon tax in 2008, the western Canadian province of British Columbia (BC) has attracted significant attention from climate policy scholars. The enactment of its carbon tax has made the case of BC intriguing, as Canada is a poor climate performer, BC is a fossil fuel producer, and carbon taxes are politically challenging to introduce anywhere. This paper discusses the BC tax, and what lessons it holds for other jurisdictions. We complement existing accounts with new details about key events and developments in recent years, and about climate policymaking in BC generally. While there are features of the tax's design and promotion that would be worth replicating elsewhere, we argue its survival reflects some simple good fortune. Moreover, the case of BC should not be reduced to its tax, as the province has enacted other notable climate policies, some of which have done more to reduce emissions while attracting less public criticism.

The United Kingdom (UK) is home to one of the most ambitious climate policy regimes in the world, centred around the 2008 Climate Change Act (CCA), the first strategic climate legislation of its kind. Building on prior studies of the CCA while highlighting Germany as a counterfactual case study, we demonstrate the significant positive role that strategic framework legislation can play in improving climate policy integration and coherence. We further show that important new institutions can be established under the right historical conditions. Specifically, we argue that the political weakening of the UK coal sector was a necessary precursor to the adoption of strong climate policy and the emergence of a structural consensus towards accelerating climate ambition, as compared with Germany where consolidation of the coal regime has been a major factor in the country's failure to meet its emissions targets. We show how business associations and labour groups in the UK were a key supportive coalition for early climate action, while in Germany industry and organized labour have been key actors obstructing and delaying the passage of pro-climate reforms. Our study raises questions about the prospects for energy transitions that are both just and rapid, particularly by discussing the trade-offs between cost-effectiveness, speed, and distributional concerns.

What is the relationship between trust and the quality of political institutions in a society? According to an influential cultural perspective, social trust—the belief that most people can be trusted—is a value inculcated during individuals’ formative years, and remains fixed afterward. A second perspective holds that social trust reflects experiences throughout the life course, particularly interactions with public institutions and officials. The authors test these cultural and institutional theories using data from three waves of the China Family Panel Studies, assessing how political and social trust respond to treatment by public officials that respondents consider unfair. The authors find that such experiences, which they show in many cases likely meant being a victim of corruption, are associated with declines in trust. Yet the effects are short lived: within two years both types of trust revert to their original levels. These results therefore provide mixed support for both theories and suggest a reconciliation between them.

Studies of public opinion toward regionalism tend to rely on questions regarding trade integration and specific regional organizations. This narrow focus overlooks dimensions of regionalism that sit at the heart of international relations research on regions today. Instead, we argue that research should explore public preferences with respect to regional cooperation in different issue-areas. We find that people's views of regional cooperation in North America diverge from their attitudes toward trade integration alone. Using data from Rethinking North America, an untapped public opinion survey conducted in Mexico, Canada, and the United States in 2013, we show that although country-level attitudes toward trade integration in North America were similar, preferences for regional cooperation varied by country depending on the issue at hand. We propose that attitudes are shaped by citizens’ perceptions of the asymmetric patterns of national-level benefits and vulnerabilities created by regional cooperation. Generally, respondents favor cooperation where their state stands to gain greater capacity benefits and oppose it where cooperation imposes greater costs on national autonomy. For policymakers, this multifaceted approach to regionalism sheds light on areas where public preferences for regional cooperation might converge. Future research that disaggregates various aspects of support for regional cooperation should help integrate the study of public opinion with “new” and comparative regional approaches that emphasize the aspects of regionalism beyond trade and formal institutions.

The study aims to explore whether gendered family roles in the country of origin and the country of destination explain labor market outcomes for immigrants in Sweden. We examine the assumptions of the source country culture literature—that traditional gender norms in immigrants' source countries drive women's employment in the new country—by focusing on gender differences and exploring group- and individual-level mechanisms, notably, that of care responsibilities. Using Swedish register data, comprising more than 660 000 individuals from 110 source countries, we analyze the labor market establishment of immigrant women and men in 2016 with multi-level regressions. Findings show that the gender gap in employment is significantly larger among groups from countries with low female labor force participation. Much of this gap is explained by women's care responsibilities, both at arrival and through continued fertility after arrival. Thus, even in Sweden, with longstanding policies promoting female employment, immigrant women's employment is conditioned by the gender-traditionality of their source countries. The findings question the gender-equalizing power of welfare state institutions in the face of increasing immigration. However, education crucially affects the implications of cultural background and fertility. In future research, these mechanisms—including the group-level correlations—should be further explored to better pinpoint the obstacles facing women from traditional countries.

Around the world, most people are aware of the problem of climate change, believe it is anthropogenic, and feel concerned about its potential consequences. What they think should be done about the problem, however, is less clear. Particularly due to widespread support among policy experts for putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions, more studies have investigated public attitudes towards carbon taxes than any other type of policy. Such studies have found substantial public opposition to carbon taxes, largely due to political distrust, though also some evidence that careful design and messaging can mitigate people’s skepticism. Surprisingly few studies have investigated attitudes towards other climate policies, and there is an urgent need for more research about what—given their beliefs about the nature and severity of the problem—people would like to see their governments doing. This is especially the case for residents of lower-income and/or non-Western nations.

While foreign pundits have alternatively blamed and praised the Chinese government’s handling of the COVID-19 virus, little is known about how citizens within China understand this performance. This article considers how satisfied Chinese citizens are with their government’s performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. It first considers the impact of authoritarian control, political culture, and/or actual government performance on citizen satisfaction. Then, it tests the consequences of satisfaction and specifically whether citizen satisfaction leads to greater trust. Analyzing data from the first post-COVID survey of its kind (n = 19,816) conducted from April 22 to 28 April 2020, the authors find that Chinese citizens have an overall high level of satisfaction, but that this satisfaction drops with each lower level of government. Further, authoritarian control, political culture, and awareness of government performance all contribute to citizen satisfaction and this in turn, has enhanced public support for the Chinese government.

The US has experienced a substantial decline in social trust in recent decades. Surprisingly few studies analyze whether individual-level explanations can account for this decrease. We use three-wave panel data from the General Social Survey (2006–2014) to study the effects of four possible individual-level sources of changes in social trust: job loss, social ties, income, and confidence in political institutions. Findings from fixed-effects linear regression models suggest that all but social ties matter. We then use 1973–2018 GSS data to predict trust based on observed values for unemployment, confidence in institutions, and satisfaction with income, versus an alternative counterfactual scenario in which the values of those three predictors are held constant at their mean levels in the early 1970s. Predicted values from these two scenarios differ substantially, suggesting that decreasing confidence in institutions and increasing unemployment scarring may explain about half of the observed decline in US social trust.