Paying for the future: deliberation and support for climate action policies

ABSTRACT

Numerous studies have demonstrated that deliberation can affect how people think about complex policy options. In this paper, we operate on the assumption that while democratic processes cannot guarantee specific policy outcomes (without losing some of their legitimacy), certain types of democratic practices – such as deliberation – can be used to encourage people to support environmental policies. We test this assumption with an experiment that was designed to examine whether there are systematic differences in support for climate action policies among groups of people who deliberated the policies with each other and those who did not. In our experiment, 330 participants were asked to consider two policies designed to help mitigate climate change: (1) increases to the US federal gas tax; and (2) a tree planting policy. Our results show that those who deliberated became more supportive of government action on the gas tax policy, and they also became more willing to pay higher gas taxes than those who did not deliberate. These findings are consistent across model specifications and substantively significant.

KEYWORDS:

• Deliberative democracy
• environmental policy
• experimental research
• future generations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Research ethics board approval

This research was approved by the Harvard University Human Research Protection Program. Protocol Title: Public Opinion and Climate Change: Long-Termism and Deliberation Protocol #: IRB14-0480.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) under grant [number 756-2013-0288], and Research Foundation, Flanders under grant 1282913N.

Notes on contributors

Michael K. MacKenzie

Michael K. MacKenzie is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA. His research interests include democratic theory, deliberative democracy, and intergenerational relations. He is the author of Future Publics: Democracy, Deliberation, and Future-Regarding Collective Action (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Didier Caluwaerts

Didier Caluwaerts is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His research deals with deliberative democracy, democratic myopia, and Belgian politics.