International Negotiations and Public Opinion: Are Negotiation Positions in the UNFCCC Negotiation Influenced by the Public?

The on-going UNFCCC negotiations today are divided into many different issues, and countries adopt positions regarding these matters. In this paper, I investigate the role the public opinion plays for the positioning behavior of states. A great number of issues and sub-issues were hand-coded from textual resources (the so-called country submission) to determine states' positions ahead of the Conference of the Parties (COP15) 2009 in Copenhagen. Using a sub-sample of democratic countries, it is then estimated how the public opinion on environmental issues influences these countries' positioning behavior in the climate change negotiations. In contrast, using public opinion data regarding economic/financial issues, I also assess the effect other public concerns have on environmental policy making at the international level. This is of particular interest, since in 2009 the financial crisis reached its peak, and public concern for the environment might therefore be offset by concern for jobs/growth. To assess the effect of economic vs. environmental concern more closely, I will also evaluate their effects on a subset of issues more directly connected with finance, for which the off-setting effect is expected to be particularly strong. Since the European Union negotiates as a single block, it is treated as a single case and public opinion data are aggregated for the whole of the EU.