The Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 allows countries to set their own emissions reduction targets in
the form of “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDCs) and is formally non-punitive, meaning that
countries do not face any sanctions for non-compliance. The approach adopted in the Paris Agreement
is often described as one acknowledging the primacy of domestic politics (Falkner 2016). This puts a
special focus on the question of how characteristics of domestic political institutions shape the
ambition and credibility of NDC pledges. Of major interest in this context is the effect of democracy,
which is the topic of this Master thesis. The idea is to empirically investigate this question using two
sources of data: (1) a unique dataset of views by climate policy experts (Victor et al. 2022) and (2)
ratings on a range of climate policy performance indicators published by “Climate Action Tracker”
(Boehm et al. 2022) and “Germanwatch” (Burck et al. 2022). To answer the research question using
these data sets, it will be necessary to first add additional data from other sources (e.g., democracy
indices) and then perform descriptive and econometric analyses. The basis for the empirical analysis
should be a careful literature analysis that reviews both theoretical and empirical literature on the
interplay between democracy and how a country performs with respect to environmental and climate
policy
the form of “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDCs) and is formally non-punitive, meaning that
countries do not face any sanctions for non-compliance. The approach adopted in the Paris Agreement
is often described as one acknowledging the primacy of domestic politics (Falkner 2016). This puts a
special focus on the question of how characteristics of domestic political institutions shape the
ambition and credibility of NDC pledges. Of major interest in this context is the effect of democracy,
which is the topic of this Master thesis. The idea is to empirically investigate this question using two
sources of data: (1) a unique dataset of views by climate policy experts (Victor et al. 2022) and (2)
ratings on a range of climate policy performance indicators published by “Climate Action Tracker”
(Boehm et al. 2022) and “Germanwatch” (Burck et al. 2022). To answer the research question using
these data sets, it will be necessary to first add additional data from other sources (e.g., democracy
indices) and then perform descriptive and econometric analyses. The basis for the empirical analysis
should be a careful literature analysis that reviews both theoretical and empirical literature on the
interplay between democracy and how a country performs with respect to environmental and climate
policy
the work should be delivered gradually to have time to discuss it with the supervisor. starting with the empirical part wich consists on 2 set of data to analyse , all data are collected . should be anlysed through R programm and interpreted and discussed.
The structure of the thesis will be as
follows:
- “Chapter 01: Introduction”
- “Chapter 02: Literature Review”
- “Chapter 03: Research Methodology”
- “Chapter 04: Results and Analysis”
- “Chapter 05: Discussion and Implications”
- “Chapter 06: Conclusion and Recommendations”
Each chapter should include sections and subsections with Arabic numerals according to the decimal classification system (1, 1.1, 1.1.2, 2, …).
The data to analyse are enclosed :
* Data – collection :2 papers to follow : Tørstad et al 2020 and
Tørstad et al 2020 suppl show methods and analysis ==> BUT the focus should be more on the effect of democracy , i collected several democracy indices.
* Data survey dataset and relevant survey questions . For information about this dataset can be found here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01454-x (see methods)