Abstract
Abstract Important challenges like climate change require transformative policy responses. According to a growing public policy literature, such transformative responses typically require complex policy packages that bundle various individual policy instruments to complement each other, compensate transition losers, and create positive synergies. Nevertheless, while adding new instruments to a package can increase policy effectiveness, it comes at a price: increased policy design complexity. Increased complexity potentially leads to fundamental public misperceptions that undermine policy legitimacy and feasibility. Here, I argue that complex policy packages affect public opinion through a compensation, policy perception, and design complexity mechanism. To test this argument, this study assesses if citizens evaluate proposals for isolated climate policies related to food and mobility behaviors differently to complex policy packages. Employing a novel two-stage conjoint-experimental approach with 9115 respondents from the USA and Germany, the study shows that policy packaging increases citizens’ perceived policy effectiveness to reduce climate pollutants, but also perceived restrictions on citizens’ lifestyles. Moreover, increased design complexity can lead citizens to pay special attention to salient costly parts of policy packages. However, increased design complexity does not fundamentally reverse preferences. Through packaging desired and undesired policy instruments, policymakers can increase public support for transformative climate policies.
Highlights
Many important policy challenges, like climate change, pandemics, and digitalization, entail a high degree of complexity, both with respect to the policy problem itself and its solutions (Weber, 2017; Sewerin, 2020)
Far most public opinion research has studied public support for single policy instruments, knowledge is lacking about the relationship between the complexity of proposed policy designs and public opinion
Many policy problems are complex and require transformative policy responses that take the form of holistic policy packages
Summary
Like climate change, pandemics, and digitalization, entail a high degree of complexity, both with respect to the policy problem itself and its solutions (Weber, 2017; Sewerin, 2020). A growing body of literature has recently suggested that bundling costly and compensatory measures into holistic policy packages can increase public support for ambitious climate policies across different ideological groups (Häusermann et al, 2018; Ingold et al, 2019; Wicki et al, 2019, 2020; Bergquist et al, 2020; Fesenfeld et al, 2020). Far most public opinion research has studied public support for single policy instruments, knowledge is lacking about the relationship between the complexity of proposed policy designs and public opinion. The paper focuses on the contested and salient issue of climate change, which requires a rapid and fundamental transformation of socio-technical systems, for example, transport and food systems (Creutzig et al, 2018; Fesenfeld et al, 2018; Poore and Nemecek, 2018; Steg, 2018). I experimentally assess if citizens differently evaluate isolated and combined climate policies with perceptible cost implications for citizens’ day-to-day lives
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