Which Democratic Innovations In/decrease Public Support for Contested Climate Policies, and Why? A Psychological Experiment Across Countries and Policies.

Democratic innovations are widely advocated as a silver bullet for combating climate change: supposedly, involving citizens in the decision-making around all kinds of climate policies is the way to promote public acceptance, and thereby feasibility of implementation, of these policies. Particularly, citizens’ assemblies are all the hype right now. Rigorous empirical support for these claims, however, remains scarce. Real life case studies cannot provide counterfactual comparisons for solid causal inference, whereas those few scenario experiments that do allow for such, typically explicitly mention that citizens were not involved in the representative decisionmaking condition – which has the potential to artificially inflate differences found, due to reactance. Moreover, existing research tends to implicitly assume that effects on public acceptance are uniform across policy types, despite strong reasons to expect that participation may matter differently for different types of measures. Likewise, it is rarely examined whether the effects of democratic innovations generalise across countries with distinct political legacies and traditions. Hence, the present research investigated the relationship between (different types of) public participation and acceptance of different types of climate policies, across different countries. To do so, we conducted a correlational survey in 13 representative EU samples (NSE=1597, NES=1590, NDK=1591, NPL=1595, NDE=1597, NNL=1219, NCZ=1726, NFR=1219, NAT=1594, NHU=1593, NSI=1201, NIT=1210, NGR=1596) assessing individuals’ perceived levels of public participation and their respective acceptance of four national level policies (beef tax, mandatory insulation, fossil fuel profit tax, flight tax). Additionally, we ran a 3 (procedure; top-down, referendum, assembly) x 2 (policy; beef tax, profit tax) vignette experiment in the Dutch and Slovenian samples, including several possible mediators. Overall, we find that perceived participation in climate policymaking positively correlates with acceptance, but to different extents for different policies (ρ(19326)=.286;.100;.070;.182[respectively], p<.001). Moreover, we find that these correlations are not uniform across countries with different political traditions. The results for the vignette experiment corroborate, and further show that acceptance levels differ across conditions due to the fact that people regard different innovations to be fittingly fair as decisionmaking procedure for different types of policies. Amongst others, some perhaps surprising results further show that assemblies can actually decreas, while direct citizen involvement (referendum) may increase, acceptance of especially policies that target citizens directly (beef tax), by limiting respectively providing a sense of agency over decisions that impose limitations on one’s freedom. In sum, democratic innovations can increase public acceptance, but only for certain policies, and only if done in certain ways. Implications for normative theory and design practice will be discussed.