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ABSTRACT
This study reports survey results of American and Chinese citizens administered to determine the effect of reciprocity and the absence of reciprocity on public support of international climate treaties. American and Chinese college students and adults were surveyed about their support for signing an international climate treaty including commitments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, conditional on the other country signing the same treaty or not. This study finds knowledge of other-country non-support on average decreases cooperative behaviour among all age groups in both the US and China. Knowledge of China’s support for the treaty is found on average to increase support among American adults, while having no noticeable effect on average support among American college students. Chinese citizens are found to not respond positively to reciprocity. Although not statistically significant at conventional significance levels, knowledge of the US’s support is found on average to decrease support among Chinese college students and adults.
Key policy insights
To increase support for international climate treaties, knowledge that another major emitter will sign the treaty does not unanimously increase domestic support.
Knowing the other country will not sign the treaty decreases domestic support for signing an international climate treaty for both Americans and Chinese, relative to not being told about the other country’s decision to sign the treaty.
Knowing China will sign an international climate treaty on average increases American adult support for signing the same treaty, while American college student support is unaffected.
Although not statistically significant at conventional significance levels, knowing the US will sign an international climate treaty on average decreases Chinese support for signing the same treaty.
Policy-makers pursuing increased international support of climate treaties by first getting support from countries with substantial historical emissions might deter international support if little attention to fairness concerns is given.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks all survey participants in both China and the United States as well as to Wen Li Han and her student research assistants who helped conduct face-to-face surveys in China. We acknowledge Brittany Flaherty, David Hahn, Emily Koehn, Gregory Sikowski, Helue Vazquez Valverde, He Yating, Zhang Ying and Zhang Yaxi for their excellent work as research assistants. We are additionally thankful for recommendations from three anonymous commenters, and Joanna Depledge.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 GHG-emission reduction requires firm/consumer behavioural change; the benefits of which accrue to all nations.
2 Arbak and Villeval (Citation2013) provide work indicating what factors are associated with individuals taking the leader role in contributing to public goods.
3 One fruitful insight of Tingley and Tomz (Citation2014) is citizens are willing to apply extrinsic sanctions, punishing polluters through other spheres of international affairs, e.g. economic sanctions and shaming in international forums.
4 Many questions used were adapted with permission from the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. Additional questions were adapted with permission from the Norwegian Citizen Panel.
5 The total number of observations for all the sub-samples is lower in – due to missing data for the variables of interest.
6 Chinese Yuan converted to US dollars at a rate of 3.72 Yuan to one US dollar, accounting for differences in purchasing power.
7 An F-test for joint significance of all demographic and initial-knowledge variables is done to check if respondents in either treatment groups or the control group have on average similar characteristics. No demographic or initial-knowledge variable is found to have a statistically-significant effect on the likelihood a respondent is assigned to a particular treatment question. Results of these F-tests for the joint significance are available from authors upon request.
8 Multinomial-probit and linear models were estimated with the exact same covariates and yielded qualitatively similar results.
9 The marginal effects and their standard errors of every independent variable included in these estimations are provided in Appendix Tables A1 and A2. The additional factors found to affect public support of international climate treaties besides reciprocity are not discussed, nonetheless they are displayed in Appendix Tables A1 and A2.
10 In 2012 American annual per-capita GHG emissions was 20 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent which converts all non-carbon-dioxide GHGs emitted warming potential to the equivalent warming potential from carbon-dioxide emissions, compared to eight tons for China. Carbon-dioxide-equivalent data was from the Washington D.C. based World Resources Institute’s CAIT Climate Data Explorer, last updated in Citation2015 (http://datasets.wri.org/dataset/cait-country).
11 The negative reciprocity effect is found in all American and Chinese adults and college students. Reduced support as a result of reciprocity is only found in Chinese adults and college students, however, this result is not statistically significant at conventional levels.