Comparative Analysis of Proximal and Distal Determinants for the Acceptance of Coercive Charging Policies in the UK and Japan

ABSTRACT

Coercive policies, such as road pricing or environmental taxation, are policies of an authority that charges or restricts its subjects in order to protect or restore common goods. Studies have shown it is important to understand the acceptability of such policies to the general public to guarantee long-term success. Our analysis, based on a limited survey of British and Japanese students, investigates well-established psychological factors that determine acceptability of road pricing directly or indirectly, such as perceived effectiveness, fairness, or problem awareness, as well as the role of a general trust in the government and a belief in “absolute values.”

Key Words:

• absolute values
• acceptability
• environmental taxation
• government trust
• road pricing

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for some very helpful comments.

Notes

¹Note that our determinant is different to the ones included in the established value belief norm theory that determine pro-environmental behavior. One might expect some correlation between for example universalism or benevolence and belief in absolute values, as all three should discourage egoistic beliefs or the importance of self-enhancement. However, there are conceptually also clear differences. Universalism, as used in the literature to describe basic human values, rather refers to a “broad-minded” person aiming for social justice and world peace (Schwartz 1992). Contrary to this, belief in absolutes might be rather described as a belief that there would be values that should be globally accepted. There might be some similarities to benevolence which is characterized with terms such as “helpful, forgiving or responsible” in Schwartz (1992, 1994) and subsequent works (e.g., Schultz and Zelezny 1999; Hansla et al. 2009), but our term “belief in absolutes” is defined rather value-free. Though it might be difficult to imagine that one would hold absolute values opposing those included in benevolence, beliefs such as that there is an authentic beauty or true justice do not define any value.

Note. Bold = significant on 5% level; bold + * = significant on 1% level.