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Decomposing Fairness: Exploring Fairness Principles as Determinants of Climate Policy Acceptability

Comparative Politics
Environmental Policy
Political Psychology
Climate Change
Survey Experiments
Lovisa Mundschenk
University of Zurich
Lovisa Mundschenk
University of Zurich

Abstract

Extensive research has examined the determinants of public acceptance for climate change mitigation policies. The centrality of perceived fairness in shaping these attitudes is consistently emphasized, with a majority focusing on factors such as burden sharing, cost distribution, revenue use, and policy targets, and fewer publications highlighting the role of procedural fairness. However, there remains a lack of clarity regarding which specific fairness principles, whether related to procedural aspects or policy outcomes, most significantly influence perceptions of fairness and, consequently, acceptance of these policies. Moreover, the importance of these fairness principles is likely conditioned by individual-level attributes, preferences, and attitudes. Different segments of the population, shaped by varying degrees of climate concern and affectedness of policies, may prioritize distinct fairness considerations. Understanding which fairness principles resonate with these different sociodemographic, preference-based, or attitudinal groups is important in reconciling the dual objectives of implementing effective yet potentially burdensome climate policies with generating broadly acceptable and legitimate outcomes. In this study, we decompose the multifaceted concept of fairness, provide a comprehensive test of different fairness principles, and analyze their relative explanatory power for acceptance of climate policies - specifically carbon taxation - among population subgroups by exploring cross level interactions. To this end, we conduct conjoint experiments in Switzerland and the United States during the Winter of 2024 and Spring of 2025. This study makes several key contributions to the literature on public acceptability of climate policies and the role of fairness in shaping policy preferences. First, by decomposing fairness into its distributive and procedural components, we provide a more granular understanding of how fairness considerations influence support for specific policies. This allows us to move beyond the binary view of fairness as merely "fair" or "unfair" and instead examine which dimensions of fairness are most important in shaping attitudes. Second, the study provides a cross-national comparison of fairness perceptions and climate policy support in Switzerland and the United States—two countries with different political systems and histories of climate policy. This comparative element allows us to test whether the salience of different fairness principles varies across different political and cultural contexts. Finally, the study's focus on individual-level interactions between fairness principles and political attitudes, and sociodemographic attributes, respectively, adds a new layer of complexity to existing models of policy acceptance. By examining how fairness perceptions vary across different population segments or attitudinal groups, we provide insights into how policymakers can design more equitable and broadly acceptable climate policies. In addition, focusing on interactions between democratic attitudes and policy attributes, allows us to link climate policy acceptability to polarization, political trust, and ideological leanings, generating insights how erosions of belief in the problem-solving capacities of democracy in face of the climate crisis can be mitigated.