Norm-Based Governance for Severe Collective Action Problems: Lessons from Climate Change and COVID-19

The world has surpassed three million deaths from COVID-19, and faces potentially catastrophic tipping points in the global climate system. Despite the urgency, governments have struggled to address either problem. In this paper, we argue that COVID-19 and anthropogenic climate change (ACC) are critical examples of an emerging type of governance challenge: severe collective action problems that require significant individual behavior change under conditions of hyper-partisanship and scientific misinformation. Building on foundational political science work demonstrating the potential for norms (or informal rules of behavior) to solve collective action problems, we analyze more recent work on norms from neighboring disciplines to offer novel recommendations for more difficult challenges like COVID-19 and ACC. Key insights include more attention to 1) norm-based messaging strategies that appeal to individuals across the ideological spectrum or that reframe collective action as consistent with resistant subgroups’ pre-existing values, 2) messages that emphasize both the prevalence and the social desirability of individual behaviors required to address these challenges, 3) careful use of public policies and incentives that make individual behavior change easier without threatening norm internalization, and 4) greater attention to epistemic norms governing trust in different information sources. We conclude by pointing out that COVID-19 and climate change are likely harbingers of other polarized collective action problems that governments will face in the future. By connecting work on norms and political governance with a broader, interdisciplinary literature on norm psychology, motivation, and behavior change, we aim to improve the ability of political scientists and policymakers to respond to these and future collective action challenges.

Vietnam in international institutions

<p>This thesis investigates how socialization in three selected institutions, namely the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the UN Security Council (UNSC) has led to pro-norm behaviour on the part of Vietnamese officials. This behavioural change was evidenced by their support for the creation of an ASEAN Human Rights Body, the adoption of Preventive Diplomacy Papers in the ARF and internalization of the Responsibility to Protect as an emerging norm at the Security Council. Empirical findings in the thesis show that socialization occurred across three case-studies, eliciting pro-norm behaviour on the part of state officials, though to varying degrees. These findings confirm the plausibility of socialization as a source of cooperative behaviour among state agents within social environments. In addition, they provide insights into the slow but increasingly active and substantive cooperation in political and security areas where Vietnam has historically been reluctant. The thesis concludes with a suggestion that socialization could be an extremely useful framework for investigating how far Vietnam might go beyond verbal support for new norms, given the country has recently embarked on a new phase of integration. Vietnam now attaches great importance to the implementation of international commitments that it has made, and considers this a guiding principle for the country‘s new integration strategy. Socialization processes could yield insights about the likely extent of norm internalization and compliance in this new period.</p>

Vietnam in international institutions

<p>This thesis investigates how socialization in three selected institutions, namely the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the UN Security Council (UNSC) has led to pro-norm behaviour on the part of Vietnamese officials. This behavioural change was evidenced by their support for the creation of an ASEAN Human Rights Body, the adoption of Preventive Diplomacy Papers in the ARF and internalization of the Responsibility to Protect as an emerging norm at the Security Council. Empirical findings in the thesis show that socialization occurred across three case-studies, eliciting pro-norm behaviour on the part of state officials, though to varying degrees. These findings confirm the plausibility of socialization as a source of cooperative behaviour among state agents within social environments. In addition, they provide insights into the slow but increasingly active and substantive cooperation in political and security areas where Vietnam has historically been reluctant. The thesis concludes with a suggestion that socialization could be an extremely useful framework for investigating how far Vietnam might go beyond verbal support for new norms, given the country has recently embarked on a new phase of integration. Vietnam now attaches great importance to the implementation of international commitments that it has made, and considers this a guiding principle for the country‘s new integration strategy. Socialization processes could yield insights about the likely extent of norm internalization and compliance in this new period.</p>

The Partial Effectiveness of Indoctrination in Autocracies

Dictators depend on a committed bureaucracy to implement their policy preferences. But how do they induce loyalty and effort within their civil service? The authors study indoctrination through forced military service as a cost-effective strategy for achieving this goal. Conscription allows the regime to expose recruits, including future civil servants, to intense “political training” in a controlled environment, which should improve system engagement. To test this hypothesis, the authors analyze archival data on over 370,000 cadres from the former German Democratic Republic. Exploiting the introduction of mandatory service in the gdr in 1962 for causal identification, they find a positive effect of conscription on bureaucrats’ system engagement. Additional analyses indicate that this effect likely did not result from deep norm internalization. Findings are more compatible with the idea that political training familiarized recruits with elite preferences, allowing them to behave strategically in accordance with the rules of the game.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the research puzzle and the argument of the book. In addition, it gives an overview of the book’s structure and chapters. The chapter briefly describes how international organizations have increasingly created or affiliated international parliamentary institutions (IPIs) without endowing them with relevant institutional powers. Quantitative without qualitative international parliamentarization is the core puzzle of the study, for which widespread accounts of functional delegation and norm internalization do not provide a satisfactory answer. The chapter presents the book’s argument about IPIs as instruments of strategic legitimation and highlights the organizational, domestic, and international conditions conducive to international parliamentarization. It concludes with a summary of the content and findings of the following chapters.

Japan’s environmental diplomacy and the future of Asia-Pacific environmental cooperation

Asia-Pacific lacks an environmental leader. Japan, a forerunner of environmental regulation in the 1970s, started to engage in active environmental diplomacy in the post-Cold War era by hosting conferences of parties to multilateral environmental agreements such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as well as providing a massive amount of environmental aid. Then, in the 2000s, Japan’s initiatives became substantially weakened and have gained a negative international reputation as the country took a considerably passive position to the Paris Agreement, filed many reservations to the CITES listing decisions, and withdrew from the International Whaling Commission. This article explores, through six brief case studies, the factors and structures that systemically impede Japan’s environmental leadership and norm internalization. It highlights the constraining factors behind Japan’s devolution including its closed bureaucratic system and the lack of positive engagement of Japanese scientists. Finally, it addresses the future prospects of environmental cooperation in the Asia-Pacific.

Cooperation, social norm internalization, and hierarchical societies

Many animal and human societies exhibit hierarchical structures with different degrees of steepness. Some of these societies also show cooperative behavior, where cooperation means working together for a common benefit. However, there is an increasing evidence that rigidly enforced hierarchies lead to a decrease of cooperation in both human and non-human primates. In this work, we address this issue by means of an evolutionary agent-based model that incorporates fights as social interactions governing a dynamic ranking, communal work to produce a public good, and norm internalization, i.e. a process where acting according to a norm becomes a goal in itself. Our model also includes the perception of how much the individual is going to retain from her cooperative behavior in future interactions. The predictions of the model resemble the principal characteristics of human societies. When ranking is unconstrained, we observe a high concentration of agents in low scores, while a few ones climb up the social hierarchy and exploit the rest, with no norm internalization. If ranking is constrained, thus leading to bounded score differences between agents, individual positions in the ranking change more, and the typical structure shows a division of the society in upper and lower classes. In this case, we observe that there is a significant degree of norm internalization, supporting large fractions of the population cooperating in spite of the rank differences. Our main results are robust with respect to the model parameters and to the type of rank constraint. We thus provide a mechanism that can explain how hierarchy arises in initially egalitarian societies while keeping a large degree of cooperation.

Norm Internalization and Disability-inclusive Elections in the Philippines

This article reviews the emergence of international norms connected with disability-inclusive elections and provides evidence of how they were cascaded and internalized in the Philippines. It examines the experience of the persons with disabilities (PWD) sector in the campaign for disability-inclusive elections. With the support of civil society organizations and international development partners, the PWD sector lobbied for the passage of the Accessible Polling Place (APP) Act which aims to improve the enfranchisement of PWDs. Primary data were collected through key informant interviews and focus group discussions, while a contextual analysis of relevant secondary documents was conducted to show proof of norm internalization in the establishment of disabilityinclusive elections.