As the effects of climate change become increasingly salient, the need for stringent climate policies has become more pressing. However, their implementation is often met with resistance from the public. To address this challenge, scholars have mostly focused on the material compensations that can be leveraged to increase public support among policy losers. In this paper, we go beyond existing literature by testing the effects of "symbolic climate policies". We conceptualize symbolic policies as policies which primarily serve a purpose of "sending a message" and signaling shared concerns and values to the public. They, per se, have very little impact on climate change mitigation nor direct consequences for most citizens. In this sense, they have low material impacts but high symbolic effects due to their appeals to shared values and emotions. For example, policies symbolically targeting the carbon-intensive behavior of privileged social groups like politicians or billionaires would qualify as such.
We argue that adopting symbolic policies increases support for costly climate policies, like reduction of speed limits or carbon taxes, when bundled together. In this example, they do so by symbolically appealing to feelings of unfairness, reciprocity, exemplarity and resentment towards elites. We demonstrate our argument using several survey experiments among a representative sample of the French population, complemented by qualitative interviews with citizens to refine the mechanisms. Our results hold significant policy relevance as they demonstrate that symbolic policies, while not directly contributing to climate change mitigation, are instrumental in garnering support for more effective mitigation measures.