Sustaining abundance : environmental performance in industrial democracies / Lyle Scruggs.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Scruggs, Lyle, 1968-

Series:

Cambridge studies in comparative politics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Environmental policy.

Sustainable development.

Environmental economics.

Physical Description:

xiv, 252 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Summary:

The ultimate goal of environmental policy is reducing pollution. Attention to environmental problems in the social sciences has brought some bold generalizations about causes of good results but almost no systematic cross-national studies that flesh out major theoretical arguments and test those claims with data. This study makes a seminal contribution to that effort in two ways. First, by taking environmental outcomes over the past thirty years as the central dependent variable, it provides a basis for evaluating national performance in reducing environmental problems. Second, by developing a data set including performance in a number of countries and elaborating on major explanations of environmental performance found in the literature, this study provides the most rigorous available analysis of the determinants of environmental performance. In so doing, it challenges what is probably the conventional wisdom in the social sciences. This book will help to place the study of environmental politics on par with other comparative studies such as Gosta Esping-Andersen's Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Arend Lijphart's Democracies, and G. Bingham Powell's Contemporary Democracies.

Contents:

2 Measuring National Environmental Performance 19

3 Economic Development, Geographic Advantage, and Environmental Performance 55

4 Public Opinion, Environmental Mobilization, and Environmental Performance 78

5 Pluralism, Corporatism, and Environmental Performance 122

6 Political Institutions 162

7 Checking the Robustness of the Results 191

Appendix I Estimated Measures of Environmental Performance 215

Appendix II Institutions for Environmental Policy Making in Fourteen Countries 219.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 229-243) and index.

ISBN:

0521816726

0521016924

OCLC:

49743670

Online:

Publisher description