What explains public support for climate policies? A review of empirical and experimental studies

Abstract

The lack of broad public support prevents the implementation of effective climate policies. This article aims to examine why citizens support or reject climate policies. For this purpose, we provide a cross-disciplinary overview of empirical and experimental research on public attitudes and preferences that has emerged in the last few years. The various factors influencing policy support are divided into three general categories: (1) social-psychological factors and climate change perception, such as the positive influences of left-wing political orientation, egalitarian worldviews, environmental and self-transcendent values, climate change knowledge, risk perception, or emotions like interest and hope; (2) the perception of climate policy and its design, which includes, among others, the preference of pull over push measures, the positive role of perceived policy effectiveness, the level of policy costs, as well as the positive effect of perceived policy fairness and the recycling of potential policy revenues; (3) contextual factors, such as the positive influence of social trust, norms and participation, wider economic, political and geographical aspects, or the different effects of specific media events and communications. Finally, we discuss the findings and provide suggestions for future research.

Policy relevance

Public opinion is a significant determinant of policy change in democratic countries. Policy makers may be reluctant to implement climate policies if they expect public opposition. This article seeks to provide a better understanding of the various factors influencing public responses to climate policy proposals. Most of the studied factors include perceptions about climate change, policy and its attributes, all of which are amenable to intervention. The acquired insights can thus assist in improving policy design and communication with the overarching objective to garner more public support for effective climate policy.

Keywords:

• climate policy
• policy acceptance
• policy support
• public attitudes
• public opinion
• public preferences

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was partially supported by the Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (AGAUR), Generalitat de Catalunya (2013FI_B736).

Notes

1. Due to space limits, we cannot offer a comprehensive coverage of the existing research on WTP for climate policy. Note further that a few partial reviews, restricted to a limited set of factors, are already available (Johnson & Nemet, 2010, unpublished; Diederich & Goeschl, 2014; Alló & Loureiro, 2014).

2. See, e.g., Huijts, Molin, and Steg (2012) for a review on psychological factors influencing acceptance of energy technologies.

3. Note that a considerable amount of literature studies environmental concern and risk perception independently of policy attitudes.

4. Note that a number of studies in the field of transportation have dealt with the question of policy acceptability. We do not provide a comprehensive overview of these studies here, mainly because transport constitutes only one out of many areas of climate policy.

5. Note that the welfare theory of optimal externality policy in environmental economics shows that environmental tax revenues should not be earmarked or serve to raise additional tax revenues but should be recycled neutrally to tax payers (Baumol, 1988).

6. A recent review of climate change perceptions over time (not specifically on policy attitudes) identifies a significant role of temperature anomalies and discrete weather events, although it remains unclear how long lasting such changes in perception are (Capstick, Whitmarsh, Poortinga, Pidgeon, & Upham, 2015).