Governance Reform and Public Acceptance of Regulatory Decision Making: Evidence from Survey Experiments on Pesticides Authorization in the EU

Do governance reforms affect public acceptance of regulatory decisions, and if so how? We tackled this critical but under-studied question through a pair of linked survey experiments on public attitudes towards the reform of EU pesticides regulation among a representative sample of the adult population in six member states (DE, FR, IT, NL, PL, SE). First, we conducted a conjoint experiment to study whether and how the specific design of decision-making procedures impact public support for EU pesticide regulation. We asked respondents to rate and choose between randomly assigned policy packages, covering five dimensions of proposed reform of EU pesticides authorization (the level of decision making, the factors to be considered, the sources of evidence, whether or not there is systematic post-authorization monitoring and review, and the effects on food prices). In a second linked experiment to analyze how regulatory decision-making procedures impact the acceptance of their outcomes, we asked respondents whether they believed that farmers should be allowed to use glyphosate, the best known and most controversial pesticide. We then showed respondents one of the policy packages that they had rated most highly, and asked them if they would be prepared to accept an authorization decision on glyphosate that ran counter to their prior expressed preference if it were taken under the regulatory decision-making procedure they supported. The results clearly demonstrate that the adoption of a regulatory decision-making procedure that people (strongly) support makes them substantially more willing to accept (or not oppose) a hypothetical authorization decision contrary to their prior expressed preference. Our study thus provides strong evidence that governance reforms that citizens substantively support can enhance acceptance of EU regulatory decisions that run counter to their prior expressed preferences, even on highly contentious and politicized issues such as the authorization and use of pesticides.