Green Industrial Policy and Public Opinion

In times of growing geopolitical tensions, the world’s largest economies are competing to promote green industrial policies. There are several reasons to support green industrial policies, including the goal of mitigating climate change and reducing critical dependencies. This paper explores how citizens develop attitudes towards green industrial policy, on the assumption that broad popular support strengthens national green industrial policy initiatives. We argue that different substantive justifications of green industrial policy influence public opinion. We use a survey experiment with respondents in France, Germany and the United States (n= 9,000) to test the effect of four substantive justifications: economic, climate change, technological leadership, and geopolitics. The experiment exposes respondents to a policy proposal that provides subsidies for green industries. We randomly assign respondents to different treatment groups in which we vary the legitimation for this policy as communicated by national governments and whether the subsidies are financed by debt or by budget shifts. We include pre-treatment questions that measure existing attitudes towards the role of the state in economic policy, satisfaction with the current economic development, and environmental attitudes that will allow us to reveal heterogeneous treatment effects. The study contributes to the debate on green industrial policy by providing cross-national original data on public support.