Environmental protection or economic growth: What policy package does the public want?

Governments often do what the people want when the public cares enough about an issue to make its wishes known, and the issue is salient. The public does generally care about climate change but are not necessarily willing to pay the cost of action. In addition, the short-term nature of representative democracy renders politicians less willing to take necessary action for a long-term sustainable society. Substantial low-carbon transformations cannot be achieved with single policy interventions, but rather through policy packages. We utilize individual level data from the Norwegian Citizen Panel (NCP) and conduct two survey experiments to examine under which conditions and with what elements specific policies are more likely to be supported by the public (N=4488). We differentiate between growth-oriented and protection-oriented policies covering a wide range of climate and environmental issues. Respondents are presented with (hypothetical) government platforms on climate policy and asked how likely it is that they would support such a platform. We also ask them to compare two alternative platforms with the two different directions for climate policy (environmental protection v. economic growth) and chose which of the two they would support. First, we find higher support for the protection-oriented policy platform than the growth-oriented policy platform. Second, a majority of respondents chose protection over growth when provided with both platforms. In addition, support for environmental protection is especially prominent among voters from the three parties with the clearest environmental profiles, cutting across the left-right political spectrum.