Limiting support for environmental policies: Unfairness is a more critical barrier than cost and ineffectiveness.

Autor: Bergquist M; Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg, Haraldsgatan 1, 413 14, Göteborg, Sweden. magnus.bergquist@psy.gu.se.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Ambio [Ambio] 2025 Feb; Vol. 54 (2), pp. 350-363. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Sep 17.
DOI: 10.1007/s13280-024-02074-9
Abstrakt: Costs and policy-specific beliefs, such as effectiveness and fairness, are central factors for supporting environmental taxes. Less is known about how much each of these factors is limiting support. Across four experiments, I investigate to which extent high costs, ineffectiveness, and unfairness constrain support for environmental taxes. Results consistently demonstrate that perceived unfairness poses a greater barrier to support than extensive costs or ineffectiveness. These findings were robust across three environmental taxes (meat tax, plastic tax, and carbon tax), across three cultures (USA, UK, and India), and were replicated using a representative US sample. Furthermore, delving deeper into the consequences of perceived unfairness, results showed that distributional unfairness was a stronger barrier to support than procedural unfairness. Beyond limiting support, being presented with an unfair tax proposal led participants to perceive the tax as less effective and to express lower trust in policymakers than when receiving a fairer tax proposal.
Competing Interests: Declarations. Conflict of interest: The author declares that there is no conflict of interest. Ethics approval and consent to participate: In Sweden, research with human participants must comply with Law (2003: 460) on ethical review of research concerning people. According to the law, research is to be conducted in such a way that the dignity and autonomy of human research participants is respected, and the research does not cause significant risks, damage or harm to research participants, communities, or other subjects of research. Ethical review is to be carried out prior to gathering data, if the research includes one or more of the following factors: (1) The research involves physical intervention, on living or deceased person. (2) The research is carried out with a method that aims to affect the research participant physically or mentally or involves an obvious risk of harm. (3) The research is performed on biological material from a living or deceased human being and can be traced back to that person. (4) The research involves processing sensitive personal data (ethic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, membership of trade unions, genetic and biometric data, health information, and data around a person’s sex life or orientation) or of personal data relating to criminal offenses. If none of the above factors is met, the application for ethical approval from the The Swedish Ethical Review Authority is not required, and it is neither possible to get approval from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority for research that does not fall within the scope of the law. In the current research, none of the above factors was met, therefore, ethical approval is not warranted. Participants were informed that their participation was anonymous, that they had the right to withdraw at any time, and were provided with the researchers’ contact information.
(© 2024. The Author(s).)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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