Why do voters agree to bear the costs of bailing out other countries? Despite the prominence of public opinion in the ongoingT he global financial system is in the midst of its most severe crisis in the postwar era, with countries such as Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain facing possible sovereign defaults.1 To prevent such defaults and a subsequent economic collapse, other eurozone countries have been asked to contribute massive sums to a financial bailout fund. Although most experts view such bailouts as necessary for averting catastrophe, many voters fiercely oppose a large transfer of their tax contributions to prop up other countries' public finances. Indeed, recent snap polls in Germany and France reveal a sharply divided public, with only about one-in-three voters willing to support the bailout program.2 How should we understand the public divide over providing assistance to the region's struggling economies? What explains the We draw upon three strands of literature to develop a set of theoretical explanations for the public divide over the bailouts. The first account centers on the distributive effects of the bailouts, the second on voters' social dispositions, and the third on the role of partisanship and political knowledge. We then test a set of predictions stemming from each of these three accounts using novel data from two large-scale surveys that we conducted in Germany, the country shouldering the largest share of the EU's bailout program. The surveys, carried out in early 2012, included a broad range of detailed items pertaining

Dominant theories of electoral behavior emphasize that voters myopically evaluate policy performance and that this shortsightedness may obstruct the welfare-improving effect of democratic accountability. However, we know little about how long governments receive electoral credit for beneficial policies. We exploit the massive policy response to a major natural disaster, the 2002 Elbe flooding in Germany, to provide an upper bound for the short-and long-term electoral returns to targeted policy benefits. We estimate that the flood response increased vote shares for the incumbent party by 7 percentage points in affected areas in the 2002 election. Twenty-five percent of this short-term reward carried over to the 2005 election before the gains vanished in the 2009 election. We conclude that, given favorable circumstances, policy makers can generate voter gratitude that persists longer than scholarship has acknowledged so far, and elaborate on the implications for theories of electoral behavior, democratic accountability, and public policy.E lections incentivize politicians to calibrate policy to voter preferences if voters reward good and punish poor policy performance electorally. This incentivizing effect of electoral accountability crucially depends on voters' retrospective evaluations. To secure the welfare-improving effect of democracy, voters need to remember, evaluate, and reward the policies that incumbents deliver. Yet, many perceive citizens as having a short-lived memory when it comes to political issues and electoral choice (

Effective climate mitigation requires international cooperation, and these global efforts need broad public support to be sustainable over the long run. We provide estimates of public support for different types of climate agreements in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Using data from a largescale experimental survey, we explore how three key dimensions of global climate cooperation-costs and distribution, participation, and enforcement-affect individuals' willingness to support these international efforts. We find that design features have significant effects on public support. Specifically, our results indicate that support is higher for global climate agreements that involve lower costs, distribute costs according to prominent fairness principles, encompass more countries, and include a small sanction if a country fails to meet its emissions reduction targets. In contrast to well-documented baseline differences in public support for climate mitigation efforts, opinion responds similarly to changes in climate policy design in all four countries. We also find that the effects of institutional design features can bring about decisive changes in the level of public support for a global climate agreement. Moreover, the results appear consistent with the view that the sensitivity of public support to design features reflects underlying norms of reciprocity and individuals' beliefs about the potential effectiveness of specific agreements.international institutions | environmental cooperation | global warming | international relations | public opinion

Mitigating climate change requires countries to provide a global public good. This means that the domestic cleavages underlying mass attitudes toward international climate policy are a central determinant of its provision. We argue that the industry-specific costs of emission abatement and internalized social norms help explain support for climate policy. To evaluate our predictions we develop novel measures of industry-specific interests by cross-referencing individuals' sectors of employment and objective industry-level pollution data and employing quasi-behavioral measures of social norms in combination with both correlational and conjoint-experimental data. We find that individuals working in pollutive industries are 7 percentage points less likely to support climate cooperation than individuals employed in cleaner sectors. Our results also suggest that reciprocal and altruistic individuals are about 10 percentage points more supportive of global climate policy. These findings indicate that both interests and norms function as complementary explanations that improve our understanding of individual policy preferences.

The effects of austerity in response to financial crises are widely contested and assumed to cause significant electoral backlash. Nonetheless, governments routinely adopt austerity when confronting economic downturns and swelling deficits. We explore this puzzle by distinguishing public acceptance of austerity as a general approach and support for specific austerity packages. Using original survey data from five European countries, we show that austerity is in fact the preferred response among most voters. We develop potential explanations for this surprising preference and demonstrate the empirical limitations of accounts centered on economic interests or an intuitive framing advantage. Instead, we show that the preference for austerity is highly sensitive to its political backers and precise composition of spending cuts and tax hikes. Using a novel approach to estimate support for historical austerity programs, we contend that governments’ strategic crafting of policy packages is a key factor underlying the support for austerity.