Cross-National Variation in Policy Adoption: The Case of Environmental Policy

Abstract

Along with an explosion of worldwide discourse and communication about environmental problems, students of comparative policy have made an enormous effort to develop theories combining the field of policy studies with environmental issues. Few of them have succeeded in building a premise that would understand the fundamental nature of the nexus between the two fields. Studies have addressed environmental problems across countries, but most of them relied on only a few cases. Furthermore, these studies often provided simple fragments of empirical tests without a well-developed theoretical framework. Such limitations resulted in a lack of a comprehensive theory and a scarcity of large-N comparative studies. This study attempts to fill this gap by examining policy adoption, specifically by investigating influences on policy adoption across 120 nations using multiple-regression analysis. Findings suggest that the presences of international environmental organizations are the key factor to affect the magnitude of policy adoption of national governments as related to global environmental protection.