Politics & Society

Climate change raises the question of who will manage increasing risks: states, markets, or a combination of the two. One way to frame this issue is via the concept of socialization. My aim is to show its usefulness by investigating a public-private natural disaster reinsurance scheme created in France in the 1980s: namely, the “cat nat” regime. I will first define socialization. I will then identify three socialization mechanisms present in the cat nat regime. Often, risks do not preexist socialization: in this regime, socialization “produces” risks through scientific instruments and administrative decisions. Thirdly, I will show that climate change leads to two tendencies in socialization processes: on the one hand, efforts are made to tame the uncertainty it generates through scientific knowledge; on the other, since uncertainty is nonetheless on the rise, it leads to tensions between interest groups about what kind of socialization to pursue. The analysis of these tensions will show that climate change accentuates the political element of socialization. The resulting dynamic is one I will call “stability in crisis.”

Prior to the authorization of the Erie Canal in 1817, it was not taken for granted that governments should directly promote infrastructure projects such as roads, canals, and railways as a means of stimulating what is now called economic development. This article investigates infrastructure promotion in this early period to examine the origins of the American developmental state. It finds that legislators repeatedly called on the nation’s public lands as a costless and freely available resource—even in the face of legally recognized Native title—for infrastructure finance. Doing so allowed legislators to rely on assumptions of Indigenous erasure to mobilize the public lands as a politically light fiscal resource that reduced the perceived costs of government action. In making this argument, this article develops political lightness as a concept for diagnosing how public budgets can institutionalize power-laden cultural contexts in public policy, makes visible the processes of Indigenous dispossession and erasure constitutive of the fiscal calculus of the modern developmental state, and contributes to the theorization of the United States as a case of settler colonial state formation.

The antagonism between far right and new left parties has transformed West European politics through increasing sociocultural conflict. We ask what this new cleavage implies for the politicization of inequalities. We contrast two diverging theoretical expectations. The first expects a tradeoff between sociocultural and socioeconomic inequalities, with new left voters emphasizing the former over the latter, and vice versa for far right voters. The second predicts a single dimension of inequality attitudes, from new left “universalists” being inequality averse to far right “particularists” being more inequality tolerant. Evidence based on survey data from Germany supports the second perspective. Even new left voters in the educated middle classes are more averse to all dimensions of inequality than (far) right voters. This implies that a successful new left agenda can simultaneously target various inequalities. However, in contexts of polarized party competition, divisive sociocultural conflicts may crowd out attention to traditional, less divisive socioeconomic inequalities.

Here, I propose a novel conceptualization of American climate politics as a form of status politics, where contestation around climate can be partly viewed as a struggle over the symbolic worth of educational credentials and academic knowledge in American society. Environmental activists have cast climate action as a matter of deference to scientific experts at the same time as educational attainment increasingly divides partisan groups, with the Democratic Party becoming the party of highly educated Americans. In this environment, I argue contestation over the status value of education has emerged historically to shape public attitudes and discourse around climate. As initial evidence, I find educational polarization around climate has increased over time in time-series survey data, driven by divergence between high-education Democrats and low-education Republicans (N = 13,138). Additionally, analyzing nationally representative survey data from 2020, I find evidence suggesting the relationship between Americans’ educational identities and their climate attitudes can be partly explained by their feelings about educated elites and experts (N = 6,720). This work calls attention to educational identity as an emotionally charged site of disagreement in the climate debate, with implications for other political debates as well.