Environmental decision-making: the influence of policy information

ABSTRACT

The success of technological development depends on citizens’ social acceptance, whereas several challenges related to the understanding of citizens’ reactions to renewable energy and its policies are identifiable. Most importantly, the gap between general attitudes towards the environment and specific voting behaviour regarding environment-friendly policy proposals calls for an explanation of how a policy’s design causes citizens who might otherwise support environmental measures to express opposition in direct democratic votes. Therefore, how policy design and policy information impact opinion formation is investigated. Salient aspects are identified, and the different types of information or qualifications that may cause opposition are considered. This new approach reveals that citizens, in environmental decision-making, do indeed consider policy design and policy information, which they regard as conditions for support, and that the type of policy information matters since citizens do not consider all of the policy details when they make decisions.

KEYWORDS:

• Public decision-making
• environmental measures
• policy information
• voting
• direct democracy
• renewable energy policy
• Switzerland

Acknowledgements

I thank James N. Druckman, Isabelle Stadelmann Steffen, Ulf Liebe and Anja Heidelberger for their valuable advice, two anonymous reviewers and the editors of Environmental Politics for insightful comments and directions for improvement, as well as panel participants at the 2017 MPSA Conference, the 2017 SPSR Conference and the 2016 ECPR General Conference for their helpful comments. The Swiss National Science Foundation (National Research Programme ‘Managing Energy Consumption’, NRP71) and the IMG Foundation supported this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary materials for the article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. The notion of ‘policy information’ stands for information, descriptions and arguments regarding how a policy is designed, which instruments are included (such as taxes vs. bans) and the effect of a policy. Here, I consider the details and aspects of a policy as policy information, which I also use as conjoint attributes in the implementation of the experiment.

2. Citizens especially have the opportunity to support or reject both simultaneously. In other words, it is not necessary to vote ‘yes’ for one of the proposals. Moreover, even if a citizen rejects both proposals, she or he can still express her or his preference in the tiebreaker.

3. The survey was administered in German, French and Italian – the three most prominent of the four national languages of Switzerland. Respondents used the following languages: 65.4% filled out the survey in German, 26.0% French and 8.6% Italian. Romansh individuals used the German version.

4. The LINK Institute in Lucerne conducted the data collection process for the Institute of Political Science of the University of Bern. The Federal Office of Statistics provided the sample from the ‘Stichprobenrahmen für Personen- und Haushaltserhebungen’ (SRPH). The collection period was from March 2016 to mid-May 2016. The response rate after three invitations was 41.7%.

5. ‘Speeders’ answer the survey as quickly as possible and it is not guaranteed they actually consider the questions, i.e. they could be engaging in satisficing behaviour, which is also suggested by the lower heterogeneity in responses.

6. Most importantly, the significant effect of strong prior attitudes leading to more heterogeneity in support eliminates the speculation that strong attitudes could lead to accepting or rejecting everything. In contrast, the results indicate that respondents with strong attitudes differentiate more and therefore are more critical and susceptible to qualifications.

7. With respect to political interest, I separate the sample into strong interest and all the lower levels of political interest; with respect to attitudes towards climate change and environmental protection, I use the median to split the sample into two groups.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung [NFP 71].