A Conjoint Experiment on the Fairness of Electric Vehicle Policy

• In Event: Adoption of Electric Vehicles and Charging Infrastructure: Policy Design and Effectiveness

Abstract

This paper examines environmental policy preferences under circumstances where fundamental moral foundations are at odds with receiving direct policy benefits. In recent years, several scholars have demonstrated that the values from Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) are associated with political ideology, partisan sorting, and policy preferences. Other research, shows that environmental policy preferences are driven by perceptions of fairness; but fairness from this literature remains conceptually unclear. We argue that how people perceive the fairness of policy initiatives depends is interpreted by the policy benefits they receive and justified by how they interpret MFT fairness. However, to disentangle the effect of MFT and particularistic policy benefits, research needs to focus on cases where direct benefits can be at odds with MFT fairness. To test these ideas, we use a pre-registered conjoint survey experiment to vary the fairness of policies that promote the use of electric vehicles (EVs)—we vary whether policy initiatives are targeted towards rural areas particularly. First, we hypothesize that EV subsidies targeted towards rural areas induce policy support among rural respondents. Second, using measures of fairness from MFT, we hypothesize that rural respondents with high fairness intensity will be the most supportive of targeted initiatives to rural areas. In contrast, urban respondents with high fairness intensity will be the least supportive of targeted initiatives to rural areas. MFT fairness, then, is not absolute; instead, we theorize that people interpret what is fair by whether they themselves will benefit from the policy initiative.

Authors

• Eric Coleman, Florida State University
  Presenting Author

• David Akinbori Akindoyin, Florida State University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author