The effects of policy design complexity on public support for climate policy

Abstract

Important challenges like climate change require transformative policy responses. According to a growing public policy literature, such transformative responses typically require complex policy packages that bundle various individual policy instruments to complement each other, compensate transition losers, and create positive synergies. Nevertheless, while adding new instruments to a package can increase policy effectiveness, it comes at a price: increased policy design complexity. Increased complexity potentially leads to fundamental public misperceptions that undermine policy legitimacy and feasibility. Here, I argue that complex policy packages affect public opinion through a compensation, policy perception, and design complexity mechanism. To test this argument, this study assesses if citizens evaluate proposals for isolated climate policies related to food and mobility behaviors differently to complex policy packages. Employing a novel two-stage conjoint-experimental approach with 9115 respondents from the USA and Germany, the study shows that policy packaging increases citizens’ perceived policy effectiveness to reduce climate pollutants, but also perceived restrictions on citizens’ lifestyles. Moreover, increased design complexity can lead citizens to pay special attention to salient costly parts of policy packages. However, increased design complexity does not fundamentally reverse preferences. Through packaging desired and undesired policy instruments, policymakers can increase public support for transformative climate policies.

Non-transformative climate policy options decrease conservative support for renewable energy in the US

“…While our results are only indirect evidence, they imply that a delaying strategy of promoting nontransformative climate change policies might effectively undermine public support for RE. This finding complements a growing literature investigating how the bundling of climate and other social policies in large policy frameworks such as the 'Green New Deal' may increase public support [22,23,52]. However, our work shows that presenting climate policies as decoupled from a funding perspective without bundling various goals, in our case RE and may undermine bipartisan support.…”

The role and limits of strategic framing for promoting sustainable consumption and policy

“…For political actors interested in adopting ambitious environmental policies, it is key to better understanding how strategic framing and the substantive features of policies interact and can be designed in ways to increase public support. One promising strategy for increasing public support is packaging policies with visible demand-side mitigation costs together with policies that compensate citizens by including clear benefits for the latter, or that redistribute costs to producers Carattini et al, 2018;Fesenfeld et al, 2020;Fesenfeld, 2018;Klenert et al, 2018;Wicki et al, 2019a, Wicki et al, 2019b. Policy packaging accounts for the prevailing beliefs and preferences of citizens rather than trying to change them through strategic framing.…”

The growth of policies, rules, and regulations: A review of the literature and research agenda

“…This decline combines with post-truth politics and the displacement of facts and evidence by the felt truth of 'cultural cognition', in which social identity conditions opinion" (Dryzek et al, 2019(Dryzek et al, , p. 1144. The work by Fesenfeld (2022) speaks to these insights by showing that in situations of high policy complexity, citizens tend to evaluate policy packages primarily on the basis of the most costly and thus presumably most controversial parts of the policy mix.…”