How Exposure to Policy Benefits Shapes Climate Reform Support

• In Event: Public Opinion on Climate Policies

Abstract

There is broad consensus among economists that carbon pricing is the preferred policy instrument to address climate change. Carbon prices also present a distinct political challenge, however. The more visible costs of a carbon price compared with regulation, or subsidies typically incites public opposition. This has prompted interest in the potential to mitigate public concerns through recycling of carbon tax revenues, especially the “fee and dividend” model. Yet, to date, studies of carbon tax revenue recycling have relied almost exclusively on theory, focus groups and scenario-based experiments. Lessons drawing from real world carbon taxation have been complicated hybrid strategies for revenue allocation (Klenert et al., 2018).
To date, two countries (Canada and Switzerland) have implemented cap and dividend policies. Yet, previous work suggests that publics in both countries have weak knowledge about the benefits they receive from these policies. Here, we report on two experiments that investigate whether increasing citizen knowledge of climate rebate programs can increase support. To our knowledge, these are the first efforts to empirically evaluate the effect of dividends in an applied, real-world context. Moreover, because public knowledge about existing dividend policies is so low, we can randomly reveal to individuals the extent and nature of the climate policy-related benefits they receive. In the Canadian case, we embedded a an experiment in the four-wave Canadian Climate Politics Panel, a panel public opinion panel survey administered on-line to a sample drawn from the Leger 360 platform. We perform the survey experiment on n=605 respondents living in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Saskatchewan. In the Swiss case, we contracted with Qualtrics to field an on-line survey of Swiss residents, quota sampled on age, gender and language (n=1000) in December 2019.
Subjects assigned to the control group received no specific information about the nature of climate policy benefits. Treated groups received customized information about the nature of their country’s benefits. In Canada, respondents were presented with a filled-out tax schedule, highlighting our best estimate of the respondents’ benefits based on the respondent’s household size, marital status, province of residence, and relative urban location. In Switzerland, we asked respondents to retrieve individual health forms on which their climate dividend is reported. All respondents are then provided with a sample health form highlighting the part of their health forms that mention the benefit.
Overall, we find null results in Canada and only modest significant results in Switzerland, with strong partisan heterogeneity. We conclude that climate dividends cannot overcome many of the political barriers to carbon pricing reforms that have undermined previous efforts to impose costs on carbon pollution. We also explore the conditions under which rebates may nonetheless prove effective.

Authors

• Kathryn Harrison, University of British Columbia

• Erick Lachapelle, Universite de Montreal

• Matto Mildenberger, University of California Santa Barbara

• Isabelle Stadelmann-Steffen, University of Berne

• Gabriel De Roche, University of California, San Diego