11:00 - 13:15
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Lena Maria Schaffer
Discussant/s:
Gabriele Spilker
Meeting Room B

Defne Günay, Gizem Arıkan, Gizem Melek
EMOTIONS AND PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR CLIMATE CHANGE POLICIES

Liam Beiser-McGrath, Marius Busemeyer
Carbon Inequality and Support for Carbon Pricing

António Valentim
Natural disasters and Green party support

Yusuke Murakami
A comparative analysis of the relationship between politics and civic education

Lena Schaffer
The Importance of Distributional Implications for Climate Policy Change
Carbon Inequality and Support for Carbon Pricing
Liam Beiser-McGrath 1, Marius Busemeyer 2
1 Royal Holloway, University of London
2 Universität Konstanz

Stringent policies that significantly increase the cost of greenhouse gas emissions, such as CO2, are increasingly necessary for mitigating climate change. Yet while richer individuals in society generate the most CO2 emissions, and thus will face the largest cost burden, they also tend to be more supportive of stringent environmental policies. This paper argues that these opposite trends occur due to variation in individuals' beliefs about the distribution of CO2 emissions and the size of their own emissions relative to others within their country. Utilising survey experiments in Germany, we examine how information on the distribution of CO2 emissions by income groups affect environmental policy preferencess. Specifically, we examine how information about individuals' household emissions relative to the average level of emissions and/or the top and bottom 20% of emissions in the country affect individuals' support for increasing the cost of emissions through carbon pricing. In doing so, we are able to better understand how the emerging distributional costs of tackling climate change affect public support and political feasibility.