Household Demand for Low Carbon Public Policies: Evidence from California

In recent years, Californians have voted on two key pieces of low carbon regulation. The resulting voting patterns provide an opportunity to examine the demand for carbon mitigation efforts. Household voting patterns are found to mirror the voting patterns by the U.S Congress on national carbon legislation. Political liberals and more educated voters favor such regulations while suburbanites tend to oppose such initiatives. Survey responses at the individual level are shown to predict the spatial variation in actual voting patterns and hence convergent validity for results obtained with stated preference data on voting markets.