Public Acceptability of Climate Change Mitigation Policies

We run online surveys in six countries. We recruit participants through professional survey companies to ensure that our sample is representative of each country's population along key dimensions - gender, income, and age. To be eligible, subjects must be adults (age 18+) and must be citizens of the country. The surveys will be performed online or on phone.

2021-02-24

2022-06-06

Support for and views on climate mitigation policies, real outcome (donation to charity), Knowledge of policies, Views on fairness, Cross-country differences

We will use a lot of the policy knowledge and perception questions as such, but we also construct various indexes that summarize the support for government intervention on climate issues, the beliefs and knowledge about climate change, the perception of the efficiency costs of climate policies, the fairness of climate policies, the preference for global interventions and so on. We will also construct measures of the misperceptions by subtracting respondents' answers to knowledge questions from the true answer, as well as variables indicating whether a respondent is particularly accurate or inaccurate. In the text analysis, we will construct measures of "topics" and "sentiment" using text analysis tools. Moreover, we will also analyze if those different variables vary a lot across countries.
Finally, we tell respondents that they have been automatically enrolled in a lottery to win a given amount of dollars (depending on the country in which the survey is run). Before they know whether they have won or not, they need to commit to donating none of it, part of it, or all of it to one charity (that fight climate change with projects to reduce the emissions of CO2). We use the amount respondents wish to donate as (real) measure of support for climate change.

In addition to the experimental variables, we are also interested in the heterogeneity of the background characteristics of respondents and will thus look at outcomes by sub-groups as defined by income, age, gender, political affiliation, education level and employment status.

We randomize the information provided to respondents, with some respondents being assigned to a treatment or a control group.

In the treatment group, respondents will see one of two videos, or the two videos one after the other. One video provides information on the expected effects of climate change (increase in storms, sea-level rise, increase in heatwaves, etc.). The second video provides information on policy options that can help mitigate climate change (pollution standards, green infrastructure program, carbon pricing, etc.). The treatment will be followed by blocks of questions on different climate change mitigation policies and asks for respondents’ degree of support for different types of climate policies.

The randomization is done by the survey software (Qualtrics).

We randomize participants in control and treatment groups within each country.

No

6 countries

12,000 respondents

Around 588 respondents for the control group in each country, around 496 respondent for each of the two videos only in each country, around 419 for the two videos in each country.