The impact of policy design on opposition to restrictive climate policies

With the growing emergency of global warming and biodiversity loss, and difficulties to reduce the impact of consumption, some researchers and government authorities have raised the idea of using rationing to reduce individuals' climate impact. Yet public opinion research on such policies and whether policy design affects public attitudes remain scant. Surveying over 3000 Swedish citizens, we provide the first experimental test of people's attitudes towards the rationing of transportation fuels and red meat in two identical, but separate, conjoint experiments. Our results reveal that the vast majority of our sample have conditional preferences, meaning their support for rationing is contingent on its specific design. In contrast, 23 % of the sample remain strongly opposed to all fuel and meat rationing proposals, irrespective of their design. Opposition to rationing decreases if people are allowed to consume more, if the allocation takes people's needs into account, if people are allowed to consume similar amounts over time and if the price for consumption does not rise unchecked. We uncover clear heterogeneities in design preferences depending on respondent characteristics, particularly for perceived fairness and effectiveness of rationing and current consumption behavior. Our findings add to the growing evidence indicating that the design of climate policies matters for people, but they also uncover the limits of policy design when climate policies have clear material implications.