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Representing the first comprehensive study of its kind, this book evaluates the comparative performance of national environmental policies since the beginning of the modern environmental era. Unlike other comparative studies, it looks directly at the purpose of environmental policy: pollution reduction. Lyle Scruggs presents four major explanations of environmental performance which it evaluates through the comparative statistical analysis of data from seventeen affluent countries. The results often challenge conventional explanations of good performance.
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This page intentionally left blank P1: ILM CY131/Scrugges-FM CY131/Scrugges 0521816726 November 25, 2002 21:21 Sustaining Abundance 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. Lyle Scruggs is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of comparative political economy and environmental policy. His articles have appeared in the British Journal of Political Science, Ecological Economics, the Journal of Politics, and Political Research Quarterly. He is currently working on a project examining changes in welfare state programs since the 1960s among twenty-one OECD countries. i P1: ILM CY131/Scrugges-FM CY131/Scrugges 0521816726 November 25, 2002 ii 21:21 P1: ILM CY131/Scrugges-FM CY131/Scrugges 0521816726 November 25, 2002 21:21 Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics General Editor Margaret Levi University of Washington, Seattle Associate Editors Robert H. Bates Har vard University Susan Stokes University of Chicago Peter Hall Har vard University Frances Rosenbluth Yale University Helen Milner Columbia University Stephen Hanson University of Washington, Seattle Sidney Tarrow Cornell University Peter Lange Duke University Other Books in the Series Stefano Bartolini, The Political Mobilization of the European Left, 1860–1980: The Class Cleavage Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State Carles Boix, Political Parties, Growth and Equality: Conservative and Social Democratic Economic Strategies in the World Economy Catherine Boone, Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal, 1930–1985 Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective Valerie Bunce, Leaving Socialism and Leaving the State: The End of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia Ruth Berins Collier, Paths toward Democracy: The Working Class and Elites in Western Europe and South America N