Should We Trust in Values? Explaining Public Support for Pro-Environmental Taxes

By Niklas Harring, Sverker C. Jagers. 2013

204 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we are concerned with what explains public acceptance and support of environmental taxes. We examine findings in environmental psychology emphasizing that people’s (environmental) value-orientation is the dominant driver determining individuals’ support for pro-environmental policy instruments. We introduce a complementary model, mainly drawing upon findings in political science, suggesting that people’s support for policy instruments is dependent on their level of political trust and their trust in other citizens. More specifically, we analyze whether political trust and inter-personal trust affect individuals’ support for an increased carbon dioxide tax in Sweden, while checking their value orientation, self-interest, and various socio-economic values. We make use of survey data obtained from a mail questionnaire sent out to a random sample of 3,000 individuals in 2009. We find that apart from people’s values, beliefs, and norms, both political trust and interpersonal trust have significant effects on people's attitudes toward an increased tax on carbon dioxide.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e5bec17d03de32bc0db5dee46a0ddc2de7f6323b

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In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

In Marketing

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Public Preferences for Carbon Tax Attributes (2015, background): “Second, previous research reveals that people are more positive towards environmental taxes if they trust their politicians and their co-citizens (Harring and Jagers, 2013; Hammar and Jagers, 2006; Kollmann and Reichl, 2015).”
Individual Factors Influencing Acceptability for Environmental Policies: A Review and Research Agenda (2020, background): “The evidence appears mixed, where some studies find no effect of generalized trust [16,33], while others find that it is positively related to support for environmental taxes [7].”
What explains public support for climate policies? A review of empirical and experimental studies (2016, background): “Left-wing political orientation relates to more favourable attitudes towards climate policies in Switzerland (Tobler, Visschers, & Siegrist, 2012) and Sweden (Hammar & Jagers, 2007; Harring & Jagers, 2013).”
Climate change skepticism among adolescents (2015, background): “Furthermore, a recent Swedish study showed that political distrust was an indepen‐ dent predictor of anti-environmental attitudes among adults (Harring and Jagers 2013).”