How much do actual or perceived societal problems shape the policy preferences of citizens? Citizens’ support for state regulation is not shaped in a vacuum but within the environments in which individuals are embedded. Yet, it is unclear to what extent policy preferences are a reaction to the actual or only to the perceived conditions individuals experience and under which circumstances external conditions shape the demand for political action at all.

A particularly salient case is the link between environment-related conditions and policy support. Although an increasing share of the world’s population is exposed to environmental degradation, support for policy regulations in this area seems to stagnate or polarize. This paper focuses on long-term exposure to air pollution, noise levels, and green space availability, and tests to what extent the actual or the perceived exposure to these environmental conditions translates into support for local environmental policies.

Leveraging geo-data and survey experiments fielded among a country-representative Swiss sample (N=5000), we disentangle the complex link between actual and perceived environmental conditions and support for environmental policies. Our findings suggest that individuals do not uniformly perceive environmental conditions of the same magnitude as equally burdensome and that cognitive processing of the exposure primarily shapes their policy support.

Since there is a discrepancy between actual and perceived exposure, this implies that worsening environmental conditions alone will not ensure greater acceptance of local environmental policy implementation. Instead, perceived experiences of long-term environmental stressors and resources hold the key to securing majority support for these policies.