Urban-Rural Conflict Over Environmental Policy in the Western United States

Salka, William M.

doi:10.1177/02750740122064820

Cited by 46 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 15 publications

(15 reference statements)

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“…A few opportunities to study voting behavior on environmental matters already occurred in the United States or Switzerland, even though not exclusively on environmental taxes (see Deacon and Shapiro 1975;Fischel 1979;Kahn and Matsusaka 1997;Fort and Bunn 1998;Salka 2001;Kahn 2002;Stadelmann-Steffen 2011). An exception is Thalmann (2004), who analyzes three energy tax proposals voted and rejected by the Swiss population in 2000.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Green Taxes in a Post-Paris World: Are Millions of Nays Inevitable?

Carattini

Baranzini

Thalmann

et al. 2017

Environ Resource Econ

209

135

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Turning the Paris Agreement's greenhouse gas emissions pledges into domestic policies is the next challenge for governments. We address the question of the acceptability of cost-effective climate policy in a real-voting setting. First, we analyze voting behavior in a large ballot on energy taxes, rejected in Switzerland in 2015 by more than 2 million people. Energy taxes were aimed at completely replacing the current value-added tax. We examine the determinants of voting and find that distributional and competitiveness concerns reduced the acceptability of energy taxes, along with the perception of ineffectiveness. Most people would have preferred tax revenues to be allocated for environmental purposes. Second, at the same time of the ballot, we tested the acceptability of alternative designs of a carbon tax with a choice experiment survey on a representative sample of the Swiss population. Survey respondents are informed about environmental, distributional and competitiveness effects of each carbon tax design. These impacts are estimated with a computable general equilibrium model. This original setting generates a series of novel results. Providing information on the expected environmental effectiveness of carbon taxes reduces the demand for environmental earmarking. Making distributional effects salient generates an important demand for progressive designs, e.g. social cushioning or recycling via lump-sum transfers. The case of lump-sum recycling is particularly striking: it is sufficient to show its desirable distributional properties to make it one of the most preferred designs, which corresponds to a completely novel result in the literature. We show that providing detailed information on the functioning of environmental taxes may contribute to close both the gap between acceptability ex ante and ex post and the gap between economists' prescriptions and the preferences of the general public.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Green Taxes in a Post-Paris World: Are Millions of Nays Inevitable?

Carattini

Baranzini

Thalmann

et al. 2017

Environ Resource Econ

209

135

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…By far the largest cluster group is the urban pro-environment group which is not unexpected. However, the facts that a larger proportion of the urban population, compared to the rural population, belongs to the pro-economic group and that more rural people belong to the pro-environmental group than to the pro-economic group are surprising and counter to the literature [23][24][25]. The second largest group was the rural undecided.…”

Section: Exploring Policy Differencesmentioning

confidence: 98%

Water reallocation policies: public perceptions

Bjørnlund¹,

Zuo²,

Parrack³

et al. 2011

WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment

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The need for mechanisms to facilitate a reallocation of water to meet demands from new users and to improve the environmental conditions of many rivers in semiarid regions of the world is increasing. Given past allocation policies, which have vested control of often more than 80% of water resources with irrigators, this will require a reallocation of water out of irrigation. Such reallocation can take place in many ways but is likely to cause pain for irrigators and their communities. This paper investigates the acceptance of water reallocation policies in the context of Alberta, Canada. We explore the influences of demographic and attitudes on the acceptance of water reallocation policies and investigate whether such acceptance differs between urban and rural residents. We find that urban dwellers are more likely to favour government intervention while rural dwellers are more likely to support policies that aim to protect irrigators' water rights. We also find that people, both in urban and rural areas, can be divided into three groups depending on their values and attitudes towards water and the environment: 1) pro-environment; 2) pro-economic and 3) undecided. The urban resident is more likely to belong to the pro-environmental group while rural residents are more likely to belong to the undecided group.

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“…However, since both of these groups can influence the decision-making process as it relates to forest management and forest thinning, it is important to understand the different perceptions and attitudes of these groups. The literature makes it clear that there is substantial disagreement between rural and urban Americans with regard to natural resource management and environmental policy (Salka, 2001). The decision of whether to continue exploiting forests for economic gain or to preserve these forests to enhance quality of life is a classic conflict.…”

Section: Rural Vs Urban Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%