Search

We are studying individuals’ attitudes towards trade as well as perceptions of environmental impacts of trade in countries of both the Global North and South.

Public opinion plays a crucial role facilitating development and implementation of environmental policies. This projects approaches four aspects of environmental policy support and behavior: (i) we explore how ‘second-order’ beliefs vary by partisan social identity; (ii) we build upon recent advancements in choice-experimental designs to identify substantive support for carbon tax and fossil fuel subsidies policy instruments and packages. That is, we propose a methodological advancement, allowing for researchers to leverage the casual inferences of choice experimental designs, alongside substantive understandings of policy support. The differences in support for carbon taxes and fossil fuel subsidies are identified using a parallelized conjoint experiment, as well as via follow-up probing questions; (iii), further, building up recent choice experimental design methodological advancements, we explore measurement (in)consistency with respondents for conjoint experimental designs. Here we first explore which individual characteristics (e.g. political and substantive interests in subject matters and cognition abilities) are associated with (in)consistency in responding to the conjoint experiment, and second, how (in)consistency varies by the measurement scale (e.g. ‘Proposal A/B’, ‘Support Proposal Y/N’); lastly, (iv) we also include a short item count technique experiment (‘list experiment’) to further build upon existing research into patterning of over-reporting pro-environmental behavior. Here, we explore the likelihood to over-report vegetarian diets and under-report eating fast food beef hamburgers. In sum, this survey contains 1 larger experimental element (conjoint experiment) and two smaller experiments (factorial experiment and list experiments), all of which are optimized for online survey implementations. In the follow section below, we elaborate on each of these research projects, and develop expectations for our future findings.

Effectively governing environmental and social externalities throughout the global economy poses challenges for democratic policy-makers in the court of public opinion. Following the median voter model, as the stringency of policy proposals increases, support rises amongst some citizens and falls amongst others. We argue informational disclosure-based governance presents a potential strategy to mitigate this zero-sum logic as citizens discount policy costs while expecting substantive benefits. We focus on political efforts to increase sustainability throughout global supply chains, drawing on two original survey experiments with representative samples in the 12 largest high-income importing economies (N=24,000). Indeed, at higher levels of policy stringency, citizens expect greater benefits than costs. Further, we find that expected benefits are more strongly associated with support than costs. Lastly, we note how policy stringency promotes convergence of expected benefits across the political ideological spectrum. Hence, our findings provide insights into public preference formation towards the globalization-sustainability nexus.

We investigate citizens' preferences for the sustainability-related regulation of corporate business conduct in Brazil, India and Indonesia.

In this project, we address the question of how consumers in wealthier countries weigh the environmental impacts of products in relation to the place of production and how much they are willing to pay for environmental quality at home and abroad. For this purpose, we will study three high-income nations: Germany, Japan, and the United States of America.

Consumption of imported goods whose production affects the natural environment abroad implies international ``insourcing'' of consumer benefits and ``outsourcing'' of environmental impacts. We examine to what extent consumer choices driving such ecological outsourcing in the aggregate, often from the Global North to the Global South, are motivated by environmental NIMBY (not in my backyard) preferences. The analysis relies on an original survey-embedded choice experiment in three large, high-income economies (Germany, Japan, United States, total N=7,494). We find considerable support for environmental NIMBYism in consumer decisions. Whereas consumers generally tend to prefer domestically sourced products, this home bias becomes weaker with increasing environmental impacts of production. One important implication of this finding is that policy makers should address potential unintended side-effects of more stringent eco-labeling requirements. The latter may in fact contribute to further ecological outsourcing by making both information on environmental impacts and product provenance more explicit., OSF Preprints