This article was downloaded by: [East Carolina University] On: 18 August 2013, At: 02:24 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of European Public Policy Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjpp20 Leaders and laggards in environmental policy: a quantitative analysis of domestic policy outputs Duncan Liefferink , Bas Arts , Jelmer Kamstra & Jeroen Ooijevaar Published online: 16 Jun 2009. To cite this article: Duncan Liefferink , Bas Arts , Jelmer Kamstra & Jeroen Ooijevaar (2009) Leaders and laggards in environmental policy: a quantitative analysis of domestic policy outputs, Journal of European Public Policy, 16:5, 677-700, DOI: 10.1080/13501760902983283 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13501760902983283 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-
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This article was downloaded by: [East Carolina University]On: 18 August 2013, At: 02:24Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK
Journal of European PublicPolicyPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjpp20
Leaders and laggards inenvironmental policy: aquantitative analysis of domesticpolicy outputsDuncan Liefferink , Bas Arts , Jelmer Kamstra &Jeroen OoijevaarPublished online: 16 Jun 2009.
To cite this article: Duncan Liefferink , Bas Arts , Jelmer Kamstra & Jeroen Ooijevaar(2009) Leaders and laggards in environmental policy: a quantitative analysis ofdomestic policy outputs, Journal of European Public Policy, 16:5, 677-700, DOI:10.1080/13501760902983283
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13501760902983283
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, orsuitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressedin this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not theviews of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content shouldnot be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connectionwith, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-
licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expresslyforbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Leaders and laggards inenvironmental policy: a quantitativeanalysis of domestic policy outputsDuncan Liefferink, Bas Arts, Jelmer Kamstra andJeroen Ooijevaar
ABSTRACT This paper investigates the domestic characteristics of ‘leaders’ and‘laggards’ in environmental policy in 21 European countries as well as the USA,Mexico and Japan from 1970. Data with regard to environmental policy strengthare related to a set of potentially explanatory domestic factors. By way of the so-called gap approach, the distance or gap between current policy in a given countryand the strictest policy available in the sample at the time is established. This isdone for 40 environmental policy issues in all 24 countries and at four points intime (1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000). Mean country gaps for each point in timeprovide a picture of changing ‘leaders’ and ‘laggards’ in environmental policy,conforming only partly to conventional wisdom. Apparently, the internationalreputation of environmental ‘pioneers’ is not always matched by equally ambitiousdomestic policies. Statistical analysis identifies EU membership as the most impor-tant factor explaining a strong domestic policy output, whereas environmentalproblem pressure, institutional structure (neo-corporatism) and the level of econ-omic development appear to be of secondary importance.
KEY WORDS Domestic factors; EU environmental policy; leaders and laggards;national environmental policy; pioneers.
1. INTRODUCTION
Variations in the speed and level of development of environmental policies indifferent countries are a recurrent theme in the literature. Most of this literaturefocuses on the consequences of these variations at the international level, orwhat is called the ‘leader–laggard dynamic’.1 According to this dynamic, stateswith advanced domestic environmental policies tend to pull along other statesthrough regulatory competition, by stimulating international regulation or byspreading innovations through various forms of transnational communication(e.g. Vogel 1995; Heritier 1996; Liefferink and Andersen 1998; Drezner2001). Following the conventional picture, leaders in environmental policyinclude North-West European countries like Germany, the Netherlands,Denmark and Sweden, whereas most Mediterannean and East European
Journal of European Public PolicyISSN 1350-1763 print; 1466-4429 online # 2009 Taylor & Francis
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countries tend to be regarded as laggards (e.g. Andersen and Liefferink 1997;Borzel 2002; Janicke 2005).
One may wonder, however, why certain countries are actually ‘ahead of others’in environmental policy. What is the domestic background of acting as a leader orpioneer in the international arena? While obviously the international and thedomestic sides are linked, a smaller portion of the literature pays attentionalso, or even exclusively, to the latter (e.g. Andersen and Liefferink 1997;Borzel 2002; Janicke 2005; Lenschow et al. 2005; Jacob and Volkery 2006).
The present paper can be situated in the strand of scholarship aroundleaders and laggards with a primarily domestic focus. It seeks to describeand explain which countries are actually ahead of others in environmentalpolicy, to what extent they are, and – most importantly – why they are. Itdoes so by making use of the extensive ENVIPOLCON data set, covering40 environmental policy issues in 21 European countries as well as theUSA, Mexico and Japan, at four points in time: 1970, 1980, 1990 and2000 (Holzinger et al. 2008).2 The data cover both the sheer presence of apolicy in a given country and, as far as applicable, its strictness. The focus,in other words, is on policy output, not on environmental impact (policyoutcome). For its analysis, the paper relies on the so-called gap approach,based on the calculation of the difference (or gap) between current policyin a given country and the best or strictest policy option available at thetime (Arts et al. 2008).
After a review of the literature in the field and a description of the data set andmethodology, the mean policy gaps for the individual countries at the fourpoints in time are presented in the form of rankings. Following that, the gapsare statistically analysed with the help of a set of independent variables, so asto find out which (domestic) factors primarily account for the differences.Finally, the main conclusions are summarized.
2. THE DOMESTIC ATTRIBUTES OF ENVIRONMENTALLEADERS AND LAGGARDS: A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
In the literature, three political motivations for acting as a pioneer in environ-mental policy prevail:
. High domestic problem pressure and/or high domestic demand for ‘green’ policies(Liefferink and Andersen 1998; Borzel 2002).
. Creating a competitive advantage for domestic industry. Under the influence ofglobal competitition, states are motivated to mutually adjust regulatory pol-icies. Recent literature suggests that this process does not necessarily takeplace in a downward direction (e.g. Drezner 2001; Holzinger et al. 2008).First, domestic industry may benefit from a (temporary) import barrier forproducts not complying with stricter domestic standards (Vogel 1995).Second, industry may be able to build up strong positions in emergingexport markets for environmental technology (Porter 1990).
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. Influencing future international legislation. The implementation of inter-national regulation which does not match existing national arrangementsmay incur considerable adjustment costs. States that are able to push theirown regulatory model at the international level may avoid such adjustmentcosts (Heritier 1996; Knill and Lenschow 2000).
The above political motivations can be very helpful in explaining regulatoryaction and international leadership in specific cases. Most of them, however,are dependent on the issue at stake; for example, the seriousness and perceptionof a particular environmental problem or the structure of industry in a specificbranch. One may wonder if policy leaders or pioneer countries themselves alsohave certain features in common which may help to explain their behaviour.
Janicke (2005) proposes a sequence of domestic factors that might be relevantfor developing a pioneer role and provides specific expectations as to theirimpact:
(a) Country-specific factors: political capacity :1 General strength of the green advocacy coalition: the existence of a strong
‘coalition for ecological modernisation’ (Janicke 2005: 136) consistingof a competent and well-staffed environmental administration, a strongand professional environmental movement, and modernizers in industry.
2 Structural framework conditions (or: opportunity structure):. economic factors: a high degree of economic development, leading to
(a) higher perceived environmental pressure, and (b) higher adminis-trative, economic and scientific capacities;
. political/institutional factors:– a strong government,– an open political system,– a culture of dialogue and consensus,– European Union (EU) membership: legal harmonization and trans-
national communication;. cognitive/informational factors: high research and development
expenditures, an effective infrastructure for the transfer of knowledgeand a sufficiently educated public.
(b) Issue-specific factors: presence and visibility of specific problems, structureof specific industrial branches, availability of marketable technical sol-utions, etc.
(c) Situative factors or ‘policy windows’: parties in government, state of theeconomy, external shock events, etc.
(d) Strategic factors: the ‘will and skill’ to actually play a role as pioneer.
As noted by Scruggs (2003) in a critique on an earlier version of Janicke’sdeterminants of environmental policy performance (Janicke 1997), however,these factors are not only hard to operationalize, but also difficult to separate.According to the conventional picture of the historical come-and-go of environ-mental pioneers, Japan and the US set the pace in the 1970s, while Germany,
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together with the Netherlands and the Nordic countries, took over in the 1980s;during the 1990s, in turn, these countries lost terrain to a diffuse group of morespecific innovators, including the UK, among others. Situative factors, such aschanges in government or fluctuations in the state of the economy, appear to bedecisive for these relatively quick changes and tend to hide the role of morestructural, long-term factors from sight. Therefore, it would be helpful eitherto be able to analytically distinguish between the two, or to bracket out situativefactors altogether.
In an attempt to identify domestic factors that determine the uptake ofenvironmental policy innovations by states, Lenschow et al. (2005) choosethe latter option by focusing entirely on basic cultural, institutional and econ-omic variables.3 It is assumed, moreover, that different factors primarilyaccount for different types of innovations:
. Culture is identified as crucial for the adoption of new ideas, principles andgoals of environmental policy. Taking dominant religion as a proxy fornational culture and following Vogel (2002), in particular, it is argued thatProtestant countries are more likely to embrace advanced, eco-centricideas, principles and goals than other, notably Roman Catholic countries.
. For the adoption of new policy instruments, the institutional structure isclaimed to be most important. Neo-corporatism is assumed to be a favourablesetting particularly for instruments based upon negotiation and consensus,such as voluntary agreements. National systems of a statist type are morelikely to prefer state-centred ‘command-and-control’ instruments, whereasliberal-pluralist countries are expected to show an inclination for market-based instruments. Given this differentiation, the institutional variable inthis view does not say much about the probability of developing a pioneerrole as such, but rather about its most likely character.
. The level of economic development, finally, is argued to account primarily forthe precise level at which standards, levies, etc., are set. Richer countries aresupposed to have ‘both more reason and more means to control pollution’(Lenschow et al. 2005: 810) and thus to have stricter policies.
Even more parsimonious is the position taken by Borzel (2002). She identifiesthe level of economic development as the single most important factor behind acountry’s strategic choice between ‘pace-setting’, ‘foot-dragging’ (i.e. acting as alaggard) and ‘fence-sitting’ (i.e. a neutral or indifferent ‘wait-and-see’ approach).The level of economic development, in her argument, determines both(environmental) policy preferences and action capacity.
Unfortunately, very little firm empirical evidence exists in this field exceptqualitative judgements and accounts of the traditional green leaders. Theysuggest that pioneers, including typically Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands,Germany, Austria and some others, are indeed comparatively rich, mostlycharacterized by a strong government, mostly neo-corporatist, mostly EUmembers, mostly Protestant, etc. Evidently, the potential explanatory factorsare strongly overlapping. Their relative influence, therefore, cannot be
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determined and distinctions within the group of alleged pioneers can hardly beestablished.
Some quantitative studies have investigated the link between environmentalperformance and economic, institutional and political factors (e.g. Crepaz1995; Jahn 1998; Scruggs 1999, 2003). Economic development and neo-corporatism, in particular, appear to increase environmental performance. Itmust be realized, however, that environmental performance refers to emissionfigures and environmental quality, or policy outcome. This is not the same asbeing a leader or a laggard in environmental policy output. A country maywell have strict and advanced environmental policy and nevertheless producehigh amounts of pollution – in fact, the two things may even be positivelyrelated.
A notable exception is a recent study by Jacob and Volkery (2006).4 Based onthe years of introduction of four policies from the field of climate change in 30countries and a set of no less than 27 independent variables, it shows thatpioneer behaviour (i.e. policy output) is stimulated mostly by neo-corporatism,governmental effectiveness (an aggregate indicator developed by the WorldBank), the strength of green non-governmental organizations (NGOs) andthe strength of green business vs. ‘dirty’ industries. Surprisingly, the effect ofthe level of economic development is reported to be insignificant. Religion orother cultural factors are not covered by this study. Two empirical weaknessesof the study by Jacob and Volkery are readily acknowledged by the authorsthemselves: (1) the four policies under consideration are all related to climateand may well cause an issue-specific bias; and (2) the dependent variable (aranking of the countries based on the respective years of introduction of thefour policies) does not allow for an analysis of changes in pioneer behaviourover time.
The empirical exercise in the remainder of this paper is based on the ENVI-POLCON project. This project’s unique data address 40 different environ-mental policy issues at four distinct points in time. The set of sevenindependent variables fully covers the factors theoretically identified byLenschow et al. (2005) and Borzel (2002) as well as a number of other key dom-estic factors suggested by the literature, notably environmental policy pressure,the openness to global (regulatory) competition and membership in the EU (cf.in particular, Janicke 2005). We therefore venture to claim that our empiricalapproach, which will be explained in more detail in the next section, providesa fair coverage of the available scholarship in the field.
3. EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS: THE GAP APPROACH
The data collected by the ENVIPOLCON project describe the development inthe period 1970–2000 for 40 environmental policy issues in 21 Europeancountries plus – for reasons of comparison – the USA, Mexico and Japan.The policy issues cover the whole range of environmental problems (air,water, waste, noise, energy and climate, nature protection, etc.). Moreover,
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the list includes policies relating to tradable products and production processesas well as procedural measures such as environmental impact assessment or eco-labelling. Finally, there are policies which have become subject to internationalregulation at any point in time during the period 1970–2000 and policieswhich have not. The data were collected by way of detailed questionnairesfilled in by established experts in the respective countries and carefullychecked and double-checked for completeness and comparability by theproject team (Heichel et al. 2008).
For this paper, two types of data were used:
. Presence-of-policy, i.e. whether a country has a policy in place regarding agiven policy issue. For reasons of comparability, presence-of-policy wasrestricted to legally established policies at the national (central) governmentlevel.
. The precise policy setting, i.e. the regulatory level (or strictness) at which apolicy is set; for example, a limit value or a tax rate.
Whereas the presence-of-policy data cover ENVIPOLCON’s entire set of 40policy items, quantified settings exist for only 21 of those. The two variableswere measured at four points in time: 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000. On thisbasis, a descriptive and an explanatory analysis were conducted using the so-called gap approach (see further Arts et al. 2008). For the present purposes,this entailed the following steps.
Descriptive analysis
First, for each policy and for each point in time the ‘strictest available policyoption’ (SAPO) was determined. For presence-of-policy this simply entailedhaving in place the policy in question. For policy settings this benchmark wasthe strictest value in force in the entire country sample at the point in timeunder consideration. In almost all cases, not surprisingly, the SAPO forpolicy settings became stricter over the years.
Second, for each country, each policy and each point in time, the distance or‘gap’ to the SAPO was established. For presence-of-policy, a country having inplace the policy at stake showed no gap at all and was given a score of 0. Acountry not having the policy in place faced the maximum gap, i.e. a score of1. For policy settings, we calculated the difference between the value of theSAPO and the actual policy level in the country under consideration. Theoutcome was then normalized to a value between 0 and 1, with 0 again signify-ing ‘no gap’ to the SAPO at all, and 1 signifying that there is no setting in placeat all.
Finally, the scores were aggregated per country and for each point in time.Particularly in the early years, several issues were not subject to any kind ofpolicy in any of the countries in the sample. In those cases, a policy was con-sidered not to be ‘available’. Consequently, no SAPO existed and the policyissue at stake was excluded from the analysis for that point in time. For presence
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of policy, only 24 issues were considered in 1970, 30 in 1980, 37 in 1990, andthe full set of 40 in 2000. The values thus obtained give an idea of the relativestrength of environmental policy – in terms of presence-of-policy and strictnessof policy – in each country and at each point in time.
Explanatory analysis
The aggregate policy gaps per country for 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000 werethen subjected to an explanatory analysis, applying the following independentvariables:
. Level of economic development. Indicator: gross domestic product (GDP)/capita (data source: World Bank 2002).
. Institutional structure. The 24 countries in the sample were coded as eitherneo-corporatist, liberal-pluralist or statist (data sources: Williamson 1989;Van Waarden 1995; Siaroff 1999) (see Table 1).5
. Culture. The 24 countries in the sample were coded as ‘predominantly Pro-testant’ vs. ‘other’, i.e. Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Buddhist, etc. (datasources: Vogel 2002; http://www.nationmaster.com) (see Table 1).
. Environmental pressure. Indicators: industrial emission of carbon dioxide(CO2): metric tonnes per capita (data source: World Bank 2002); populationdensity: capita/km2 (data source: World Bank 2002).
. Trade openness. Indicator: foreign trade (import plus export) as a percentageof GDP (data source: World Bank 2002).
. EU membership. Indicator: the year of the beginning of accession talks. Weassume that the process of taking over the acquis communautaire as well as thecommunicative effects of membership already start with the beginning ofaccession talks (cf. Heichel et al. 2008).
The explanatory analysis consisted of two steps, which will be discussed inmore detail below.
4. DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS: COUNTRY RANKINGS
Tables 2 and 3 present the country rankings for presence-of-policy and policysettings, respectively, in 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000. A lower figure indicatesa smaller distance to the SAPO, i.e for each point in time the ‘best performers’are at the top of the list.
First, the steady lowering of the mean gap for presence-of-policy across theentire country sample (from 0.8767 in 1970 to 0.2917 in 2000) shows thatover the past 30 years environmental policies have spread effectively. In 1970,several countries had few or even none of the policies in place that were ‘avail-able’ at the time (i.e. a country mean gap close or equal to 1). In 2000, almost allcountries had installed at least half of the ‘current’ policies (i.e. a country meangap below 0.5). In 1970, even in the ‘best performing’ countries more than halfof the then ‘available’ policies had not gained footing. This had dramatically
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improved in 2000. The settings figures, moreover, suggest that policies not onlyspread as such but did so at an ever stricter level. In fact, two trends are com-bined here: both the SAPO as such becomes stricter over the years for almostall policies and the average distance to this increasingly strict SAPO decreases.
Second, the rankings for 1990 and 2000 roughly confirm the conventionaldivision between leaders and laggards in environmental policy (e.g. Andersenand Liefferink 1997; Borzel 2002; Janicke 2005). While countries located pre-dominantly in North-western Europe head the lists, countries from the southernand eastern parts of Europe as well as Mexico and – surprisingly – the USApopulate the lowest ranks.
However, this division stands out considerably less clearly in the 1970s and1980s. For instance, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Austria
Table 1 Characterization of countries for the independent variables ‘culture’ and‘institutional structure’
Protestant Other Neo-corporatist Liberal-pluralist Statist
Austria þ þ
Belgium þ þ
Bulgaria þ þ
Denmark þ þ
Finland þ þ
France þ þ
Germany þ þ
Greece þ þ
Hungary þ þ
Ireland þ þ
Italy þ þ
Japan þ þ
Mexico þ þ
Netherlands þ þ
Norway þ þ
Poland þ þ
Portugal þ þ
Romania þ þ
Slovakia þ þ
Spain þ þ
Sweden þ þ
Switzerland þ þ
UK þ þ
USA þ þ
Sources: Vogel 2002; http://www.nationmaster.com; Williamson 1989; VanWaarden 1995; Siaroff 1999; adapted from Lenschow et al. 2005.
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Table 2 Presence-of-policy: country rankings and mean policy gaps in 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000
1970 1980 1990 2000
Country Mean gap Country Mean gap Country Mean gap Country Mean gap
Belgium 0.6250 Hungary 0.5000 Germany 0.3514 Germany 0.1000Hungary 0.6667 Belgium 0.5667 Switzerland 0.3514 Netherlands 0.1250Sweden 0.7500 Italy 0.5667 France 0.4054 Austria 0.1500France 0.7917 Japan 0.5667 Austria 0.4054 France 0.1750Finland 0.8333 Sweden 0.6000 Italy 0.4324 Italy 0.1750Italy 0.8333 Germany 0.6000 Portugal 0.4324 Switzerland 0.2000Japan 0.8333 Switzerland 0.6333 Spain 0.4595 Sweden 0.2000Switzerlan 0.8333 France 0.6667 UK 0.4865 Portugal 0.2250UK 0.8333 Finland 0.6667 Netherlands 0.5135 Spain 0.2250USA 0.8333 UK 0.6667 Hungary 0.5405 Finland 0.2250Bulgaria 0.8750 Netherlands 0.7333 Sweden 0.5405 Denmark 0.2250Germany 0.8750 Norway 0.7333 Belgium 0.5676 Hungary 0.2500Slovenia 0.8750 Ireland 0.7333 Finland 0.5946 UK 0.2750Netherlands 0.9167 Austria 0.7333 Norway 0.5946 Japan 0.2750Norway 0.9167 USA 0.7667 Denmark 0.6216 Slovenia 0.3250Denmark 0.9583 Slovenia 0.7667 Japan 0.6486 Mexico 0.3500Ireland 0.9583 Denmark 0.7667 Ireland 0.7027 Greece 0.3500Mexico 0.9583 Bulgaria 0.8000 Mexico 0.7027 Norway 0.3750
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Table 2 Continued
1970 1980 1990 2000
Country Mean gap Country Mean gap Country Mean gap Country Mean gap
Poland 0.9583 Spain 0.8000 Greece 0.7027 Ireland 0.3750Portugal 0.9583 Poland 0.9000 Poland 0.7297 Poland 0.3750Spain 0.9583 Portugal 0.9000 Bulgaria 0.7838 Romania 0.3750Austria 1.0000 Mexico 0.9667 USA 0.8108 Bulgaria 0.4250Greece 1.0000 Greece 0.9667 Slovenia 0.8108 Belgium 0.5750Romania 1.0000 Romania 1.0000 Romania 0.8919 USA 0.6500
Mean 0.8767 0.7333 0.5867 0.2917
Source: ENVIPOLCON.
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Table 3 Policy settings: country rankings and mean policy gaps in 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000
1970 1980 1990 2000
Country Mean gap Country Mean gap Country Mean gap Country Mean gap
Belgium 0.5027 Belgium 0.5728 Germany 0.3515 Germany 0.2845France 0.7815 Germany 0.7163 Austria 0.4086 Netherlands 0.3516Italy 0.8166 Slovenia 0.7789 Switzerland 0.4746 Austria 0.3862Sweden 0.8538 Sweden 0.7841 Italy 0.5052 Sweden 0.4905Switzerland 0.8688 Japan 0.7921 Belgium 0.5815 Italy 0.5311Hungary 0.8712 Italy 0.8029 France 0.6058 Finland 0.5343Slovenia 0.8750 Hungary 0.8103 Netherlands 0.6330 France 0.5410Finland 0.8784 Finland 0.8156 UK 0.6560 Denmark 0.5425USA 0.8849 USA 0.8333 Portugal 0.6603 Spain 0.5523UK 0.8920 UK 0.8473 Spain 0.6679 Hungary 0.5671Germany 0.9409 Austria 0.8555 Hungary 0.6998 Switzerland 0.5765Netherlands 0.9655 Spain 0.8609 Finland 0.7087 Portugal 0.5876Japan 0.9813 Norway 0.8754 Sweden 0.7131 Slovenia 0.5994Norway 0.9875 Switzerland 0.8756 Norway 0.7228 UK 0.6027Austria 1.0000 Bulgaria 0.8889 Denmark 0.7527 Japan 0.6581Bulgaria 1.0000 Netherlands 0.8893 Ireland 0.8349 Ireland 0.6789Denmark 1.0000 France 0.8986 USA 0.8421 Norway 0.6850Greece 1.0000 Denmark 0.9106 Slovenia 0.8546 Belgium 0.6931
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Table 3 Continued
1970 1980 1990 2000
Country Mean gap Country Mean gap Country Mean gap Country Mean gap
Ireland 1.0000 Ireland 0.9370 Japan 0.8623 Mexico 0.6993Mexico 1.0000 Portugal 0.9535 Poland 0.8666 Romania 0.7137Poland 1.0000 Greece 1.0000 Mexico 0.8721 Greece 0.7689Portugal 1.0000 Mexico 1.0000 Bulgaria 0.8863 Bulgaria 0.7737Romania 1.0000 Poland 1.0000 Greece 0.9413 Poland 0.8092Spain 1.0000 Romania 1.0000 Romania 0.9983 USA 0.8342
Mean 0.9208 0.8624 0.7125 0.6026
Source: ENVIPOLCON.
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occupy relatively low positions in 1970 and 1980, whereas unexpected countriessuch as Belgium, Hungary and Italy appear as leaders in those years. This couldeasily be dismissed by arguing that those countries were just, as it were by coinci-dence, the first ones to dress their windows in response to the rising concernabout environmental degradation at the international level, expressed, forinstance, at the Stockholm Conference of 1972, but subsequently failed toproperly implement their good intentions. This may indeed be part of thestory (cf. Rehbinder and Stewart 1985; Welfens 1993; Lewanski 1998). Onemay wonder, however, why Hungary and Italy, among others, retained relativelyhigh positions in 1990 and 2000 regarding both presence-of-policy and policysettings. What we now tend to perceive as pioneer countries seem to be basedmainly on their observed international roles, i.e. how they articulate their pos-itions in the EU and other international forums (e.g. Liefferink and Andersen1998; Borzel 2002). The data suggest that a much wider group of countriespursued ambitious environmental policies internally and sometimes at anearly moment (e.g. Leroy and De Geest 1985: 116f., for Belgium), but appar-ently without strongly articulating them at the international level. The picture ofa much more diffuse group of countries showing pioneering behaviour occasion-ally is in accordance with the very diverse patterns for the diffusion of environ-mental policy innovations reported by Busch and Jorgens (2005). It is furthersupported by the positions of, for instance, Denmark, the Netherlands (up to1990) and Norway in Tables 2 and 3: while usually seen as pioneers in an inter-national perspective, these countries by no means belong to the very best perfor-mers as regards domestic presence-of-policy and policy settings. And even if wetake the few countries that combine a strong international profile and high dom-estic output, notably Germany and Austria, we find that their roles crystallizeonly from 1990.
Environmental pioneers, in other words, seem to have ‘internal’ and ‘external’faces which are not necessarily similar. First, as referred to above, the reputation ofbeing a policy leader appears to be primarily based upon efforts in the internationalarena. Such an ambitious ‘external’ face may well be brought about by the politicalmotivations listed earlier: the wish to push neighbouring countries to (also) reducelevels of pollution, the attempt to create a level playing field or even a competitiveadvantage for domestic industry and/or the attempt to avoid future adjustmentcosts. This does not exclude, however, the fact that ‘internal’ policies start out con-siderably less ambitious, for instance, because of domestic complications orpressure from industry (e.g. Tews and Binder 2006, for the area of climatechange). Second, it may very well be that a reputation as pioneer – either ‘exter-nally’ or ‘internally’, or both – is based on a fairly limited number of specific,strongly politicized issues, such as acidification, hazardous chemicals or climatechange. Policies in other fields may be less heroic (e.g. Reitan 1997 on Norway).
Finally, a few words must be said on the particular behaviour of federal statesin Tables 2 and 3. Belgium and the US both topple down from high ranks in theearly years to very low positions in 2000. This may partly reflect an actual relax-ation of environmental ambitions, in the case of the US commonly associated
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with the Reagan administration (Vig and Kraft 1997). Part of the effect,however, is caused by the fact that the ENVIPOLCON data set is limited tothe central level. In the 1980s and 1990s, both in Belgium (Burssens andGeeraerts 2006) and in the US (Rabe 1997), many competences in the environ-mental field were moved to regional or state levels, respectively. Inevitably, somenew and/or stricter policies must have remained out of sight of this project. Thesurprisingly low ranking of relatively decentralized states such as Denmark andNorway may in fact be partly due to the same artefact. Apparently, Germany, agenuinely federal state, did not suffer from this effect. Here, regulatory compe-tences in the environmental field were from the beginning concentrated at thefederal level and remained, both formally and in practice, fairly stable (Pehle1998: 199ff.).
In our attempt to explain what we have found so far, we first carried out a bivari-ate analysis, linking the calculated country gaps to the independent variables ona one-by-one basis. For the independent variables with a continuous character(trade openness, GDP/capita, CO2 emissions and population density),Pearson correlations with significances can be found in Table 4. For thenominal independent variables (culture operationalized as dominant religion,institutional structure, EU membership), Table 5 lists the mean policy gapsfor the different sub-groups (Protestant vs. other; neo-corporatist vs. liberal-pluralist vs. statist; EU member vs. non-member). Asterisks indicate the statisti-cal significance of the differences between the sub-groups, calculated with thehelp of an analysis of variance (ANOVA) test. The results in Tables 4 and 5are specified for presence-of-policy and policy settings, respectively, and forthe four points in time.
All variables except two produce significant results at least at some points intime. Confirming Borzel (2002) and Janicke (2005), but in contrast withJacob and Volkery (2006), the level of economic development is found to beconducive to environmental policy output. This applies to the strictness ofpolicy settings, as expected by Lenschow et al. (2005), but in 1980 and 1990also to presence-of-policy. Somewhat surprisingly, the latter effect disappearsin 2000. The reason may be that, by that time, environmental policies hadbecome part of the standard repertoire also in poorer countries – which, bythe way, had become richer in the meantime too. However, differencesbetween richer and poorer countries regarding the strictness of policies remainsignificant in 2000. These findings are broadly in line with the so-called environ-mental Kuznets curve, which assumes that the relationship between income andenvironmental quality (although not necessarily policy output) turns from nega-tive into positive as countries become richer (Ekins 1997).
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Table 5 Differences between mean policy gaps for sub-groups in relation to nominal independent variables
Industrial CO2 emissions have a significant effect particularly for presence-of-policy in 1970 and 2000, but not in the intervening years. Interestingly, thesign of the co-efficient changes from negative to positive over this period.Although not wholly significant, the same occurs for policy settings. It suggeststhat countries with high CO2 emissions, as a proxy for environmentalpressure, initially had low mean gaps, i.e. a relatively high policy output.This is as expected, assuming that high problem pressure stimulates policyefforts. In 2000, however, countries with high CO2 emissions appear tohave turned into relative laggards with comparatively high policy gaps. Thisis a slightly puzzling finding, for which at least two possible explanationscome to mind. The first is that policy efforts in countries exhibiting highlevels of pollution first tended to be ambitious – harvesting the ‘low-hanging fruit’ – but failed to keep pace with further increases in emissionlevels. It should be added, though, that this trend is not reproduced by theother indicator for environmental problem pressure, population density.Although significant only at some points in time, here the signs remain negativethroughout, implying that more densely populated countries consistently tendto have stronger environmental policies. The second possible explanation is thatwe are dealing here with a time effect linked quite specifically to the issue of CO2
emissions. It could then be argued that, around 1970, high CO2 emissions wereindeed a good indicator for a high level of industrialization and, thus, highenvironmental problem pressure. In accordance with the original expectation,countries with high CO2 emissions, predominantly located in WesternEurope, developed relatively strict policies in that period. In 2000, however,high CO2 emissions no longer pointed to a high level of industrialization assuch, but rather to a high share of ‘old’ industries, characterized by lowenergy-efficiency and high CO2 emissions per unit and typical for Centraland Eastern European countries at the time. In 2000, in short, according tothis explanation, the countries with high CO2 emissions were not the same asthose in 1970, which may well account for the observed reversed relationshipwith policy output.6
Turning to the impact of institutional structure, it appears that countriescharacterized as neo-corporatist consistently exhibit lower policy gaps thanliberal-pluralist and statist ones. While some authors argue that the privilegedposition of traditional economic interests and risk-averse consensus mechanismsin neo-corporatist systems tend to impede environmental policy innovations(Andersen 1994; Hukkinen 1995), others claim that collective action problemsinherent in environmental policy can be solved more easily in neo-corporatist‘closed shops’ based on trust and long-term reciprocity (Crepaz 1995;Scruggs 1999). Focusing on policy output and in line with both Janicke(2005) and Jacob and Volkery (2006), our data confirm the latter thesis. Asregards the other two institutional types, liberal-pluralist countries appear asmore environmentally advanced in 1970 (not significant) and 1980, whereasstatist countries perform better in 1990 (significant only for settings) andnotably 2000. Considering that our sample contains no more than three
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liberal-pluralist countries (see Table 1), this may be caused largely by the declineof the US, discussed earlier.
As expected, EU membership leads to lower policy gaps. Particularly in 2000,this effect is highly significant. It may be due both to harmonization of regu-lations and to learning processes, fuelled by intensive communicationbetween the EU members (Holzinger et al. 2008).
It turns out, finally, that two variables do not produce any significant results atall: trade openness and culture, operationalized as religion. This conforms withthe finding, reported earlier, that trade openness, contrary to the thesis of regu-latory competition, has hardly any effect on the change of policy gaps over time(Arts et al. 2008). Against this background, the insignificance of trade opennessfor explaining country gaps as such does not come as a total surprise. As regardsreligion, it must be noted that the Protestant sub-group consistently produces alower policy gap than the other countries, thus confirming the thesis developedby Vogel (2002). However, the effect never reaches significance.
Multivariate analysis
The bivariate analysis gives a first, rough indication of which independent vari-ables are most relevant for explaining differences in policy gaps betweencountries, but does not tell anything about their relative weight. Therefore, ina second analysis, a step-wise multivariate regression was conducted, testingseveral models consisting of different sub-sets of independent variables. Inthose models, the predictive power of each independent variable is controlledfor by all other independent variables in the model. The findings are listed inTables 6 (for presence-of-policy) and 7 (for policy settings). Note that a finalmodel including all independent variables is lacking. This exercise, which is anormal conclusion to a step-wise regression approach, did not yield any signifi-cant results and was therefore left out of the tables. Furthermore, it must be notedthat the overall significance of the four models is, unfortunately, limited. Onlytwo models reach an adjusted R2 above 0.3. Four others, all to be found in1990 and 2000, reach R2 values between 0.2 and 0.3. While a reasonablenumber of individual co-efficients turn out significant for presence-of-policy(p , 0.10 or p , 0.05), moreover, only a few do so for policy settings. Theserelatively poor results are probably caused primarily by the inevitably limitednumber of observations.
Having said this, the factor that most convincingly survives the multivariate‘test’ is EU membership. The negative sign of the co-efficient indicates thatmembership of the EU leads to a lower gap. Second, problem pressure, bothin terms of population density and industrial emissions, yields significantresults in some of the models and decades (although to a lesser extent thanEU membership). With the exception of CO2 emissions in the year 2000 forpresence-of-policy, discussed above, countries that are more pressurized byenvironmental problems tend to have lower gaps and thus stricter policylevels. Third, institutional structure produces some significant results. In
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Table 6 Regression results, mean policy gap for presence-of-policy
1970 1980
Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4
accordance with the bivariate analysis, liberal-pluralist countries have a higherpolicy gap in 1990 and 2000 than the two other sub-groups (neo-corporatistand statist).7 Finally, the so-called ‘income effect’, i.e. the level of economicdevelopment lowering the policy gap, appears less relevant in the multivariatethan in the bivariate analysis. Related to other independent variables, it exhibitsweaker explanatory power.
6. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we analysed the domestic characteristics of leaders and laggards inenvironmental policy across 21 European countries plus the USA, Mexico andJapan. The basic unit of analyis was the gap between a country’s current policyand the strictest policy available in the country sample at the time. It was foundthat gaps tended to decrease over time for all countries. Combined with theobservation that the strictest available policy options themselves almostwithout exception became stricter over time (Arts et al. 2008), this suggeststhe continuous proliferation of environmental policies between 1970 and2000 at an ever stricter average level or, put in different terms, policy conver-gence in an upward direction.
EU membership turned out to be the most powerful factor explaining astrong domestic environmental policy output. This effect is likely to be duenot only to economic factors (such as EU subventions to new members,foreign investments and economic growth) and to the implementation of theacquis communautaire as such, but also to the communicative aspect of member-ship, leading to increased policy transfer (Holzinger et al. 2008).
In addition, confirming the existing theoretical literature (Borzel 2002;Janicke 2005; Lenschow et al. 2005), high environmental problem pressure, aneo-corporatist institutional structure and a high level of economic develop-ment appeared as conducive to environmental policy too, but in the multivariateanalysis these three factors did not hold as strongly as EU membership. Therelationships do seem to exist, but turn out to be relatively weak when otherfactors come into play.
Dominant religion, as a proxy for cultural factors (cf. Lenschow et al. 2005),and trade openness yielded no significant effects at all. The latter points to anabsence of the mechanism of regulatory competition (cf. also Holzinger et al.2008). The low overall statistical significance of the regression models suggeststhat other structural and – most probably – issue-specific factors also play a rolein explaining differences in environmental policy output. Adding further inde-pendent variables to the analysis, however, would require an even larger empiri-cal data set. In the meantime, the factors that were found in this paper to have aneffect must be seen as necessary rather than sufficient conditions for an advancedenvironmental policy output.
One finding derived from the descriptive part of the analysis deserves specialmention here. In the literature, a group of mainly North-West Europeancountries is usually seen as environmental policy leaders. In our data, this
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group becomes hesitantly visible only in 1990 and 2000. And even then, onlysome of them (notably Germany and Austria) appear among the very best per-formers, whereas others (e.g. Denmark, Norway, to some extent also the Neth-erlands) take no more than modest positions in the rankings. This findingsuggests that a reputation as an environmental leader in the internationalarena is not necessarily matched by highly ambitious domestic policies, atleast not across the board. ‘External’ pioneering behaviour, i.e. pushing dom-estic policies at the EU or international level, is probably highly dependenton the issue at stake: countries tend to prioritize a few domestically politicizedissues, while for many others domestic political or institutional complicationsand/or concern for the competitiveness of domestic industry prevail (cf. Ander-sen and Liefferink 1997). This may also help to explain why reputed environ-mental leaders such as Germany or the Netherlands sometimes have severeproblems implementing (other) international and EU obligations (cf. Borzel2000; Knill and Lenschow 2000; Knill 2001; Jordan and Liefferink 2004).
Biographical notes: Duncan Liefferink is Senior Researcher in the Departmentof Environmental Policy Sciences, Institute for Management Research,Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Bas Arts is Professor ofForest and Nature Conservation Policy, Wageningen University and ResearchCentre, The Netherlands. Jelmer Kamstra is a Ph.D. candidate on the topicof civil society and democratization in the Centre for International Develop-ment Issues Nijmegen (CIDIN), Faculty of Social Sciences, Radboud Univer-sity Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Jeroen Ooijevaar is a researcher at StatisticsNetherlands. Jelmer Kamstra and Jeroen Ooijevaar run 101 Research, a researchagency specializing in social scientific research.
Address for correspondence: Duncan Liefferink, Radboud UniversityNijmegen, Institute for Management Research, Department of EnvironmentalPolicy Sciences, PO Box 9108, NL-6500 HK Nijmegen, The Netherlands.email: [email protected]
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Research underlying this paper was generously funded by the European UnionRTD programme ‘Improving the human research potential and the socio-economicknowledge base’, contract no. HPSE-CT-2002-00103. The authors would like tothank the three anonymous referees, Andrea Lenschow, Pieter Leroy and SietskeVeenman for helpful comments.
NOTES
1 Terms such as ‘leader’, ‘laggard’, ‘pioneer’, etc. are used in this paper in a non-normative sense.
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2 ENVIPOLCON is the acronym of ‘ENVIronmental governance in Europe: theimpact of international institutions and trade on POLicy CONvergence’. Theproject was financed by the EU and carried out between 2003 and 2006 by teamsat the Universities of Konstanz, Nijmegen, Hamburg, Berlin (FU) and Salzburg.
3 Although focusing on the uptake of environmental policy innovations originatingelsewhere, the factors identified by Lenschow et al. (2005) can be argued to beequally relevant for the development of such innovations domestically. In fact,both ways may be expected to play a role in pioneer countries: they are likely to beat times ‘inventors’, at times ‘early followers’ of policy innovations.
4 Also Ringquist (1993) provides quantitative comparative evidence on policy output,but focuses on states within the US.
5 For statistical purposes, this threefold distinction was operationalized with the help oftwo nominal or dummy variables.
6 We would like to thank Andrea Lenschow for drawing our attention to this interpret-ation.
7 The lower but still positive values for the neo-corporatist dummy seem to implythat neo-corporatist countries have a slightly higher gap than the combined liberal-pluralist and statist countries in our sample (which would in fact contradict theearlier findings). This finding is not statistically significant, however.
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