Climatic Vulnerability, Compensation Mechanisms, and Support for Climate Policy

• In Event: Public Opinion and the Environment in Global Context

Abstract

States are central to solving the issue of climate change: National governments need to commit to action in order for this global public good problem to be efficiently addressed (Keohane and Victor 2016). Public opinion and mass preferences are key mechanisms through which governments seriously commit to climate change mitigation. This paper examines the environmental and policy determinants of mass support for decarbonization policies. Are there policies that can both decarbonize the economy and sufficiently compensate the losers from these policies in order to foster mass support for climate change regulations? In order to answer this question, we examine individuals’ sensitivity to climate change policy attributes with a specific emphasis on policy compensation. Individuals potentially face costs both due to climate change itself and due to government policies put in place to prevent climate change. We therefore analyze how individuals from communities differently vulnerable to climate change and its solutions are sensitive to the design of climate policies, and whether compensation to those who are harmed most by decarbonization increases their willingness to support climate policy. Our conjecture is that being exposed to either or both of the costs outlined above will affect the predisposition that individuals will have to compensation, and specifically to different types of compensation mechanisms. We examine our theoretical predictions about the role of climatic vulnerability and compensation mechanisms on support for climate policies with a series original, paired survey experiments in the United States and India, the world’s most powerful and largest democracies, respectively, major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, and key actors in global negotiations on climate cooperation. Within each country, we focus on vulnerable communities that vary on two dimensions: Those that face differential costs from climate change itself and those that are affected differently from regulatory policies aimed at the mitigation of emissions. By studying the determinants of policy support both among nationally representative samples, and targeted samples of regional communities that have particular characteristics relating to the emission of greenhouse gases and exposure to the effects of climate change, our survey experiments evaluate how exposure to different combinations of risks leads individuals to display varying degrees of sensitivity to the attributes of climate change policies. Overall, this paper brings to the forefront new evidence on the role of climatic vulnerability and compensatory mechanisms in determining mass support for climate policy and action.

Authors

• Nikhar Gaikwad, Columbia University

• Federica Genovese, University of Essex

• Dustin Halliday Tingley, Harvard University