Can societal tipping dynamics help to generate majority support for carbon taxing?

Effective climate policies are notoriously difficult to implement politically. In particular, most economists believe that carbon pricing, i.e., direct government policies to increase the cost of releasing carbon pollution into the atmosphere, is the optimal climate policy. However, carbon-pricing proposals have met with fierce political resistance across the world, with public opposition catalyzed by policy opponents. Based on conjoint analyses from two countries, Switzerland and the United States, we investigate whether and how social tipping dynamics related to value change can help these policies to gain majority support. First, we capture tipping towards majority support by analyzing the factors that lead individuals to support carbon tax proposals. We apply the tipping logic by applying a “hard” measure of support, i.e. we only code those respondents as supporting who indicated to support hypothetical conjoint scenarios with a likelihood of 75% or more. Based on this, we can identify proposals that have the potential to receive majority support and thus lead to a tipping towards carbon taxing. Moreover, we investigate the role of societal values and value change at two levels. On the one hand, we rely on our conjoint analysis, where we have several attributes indicating the position of political and societal actors towards the carbon tax proposals. Hence, this helps us to assess whether parties and civil society organizations (and which ones), by supporting according policies, can make citizens tip towards supporting according policies. On the other hand, we analyze the difference between respondents with strong and weak climate change attitudes to gain insights on whether societal change, i.e., the move towards more pronounced climate change concern, can substantially influence the evaluation of carbon taxation policies and therewith their public support.