Size of Government and Willingness-to-Pay for Environmental Policy : Evidence from a Cross-Country Survey

Citizen support is an important precursor to climate change mitigation polices. Public opinion can shape public policy and vice versa. Despite an extensive literature, there is still disagreement on how country-level contextual factors shape overall support for environmental policy. This paper uses the 2010 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Environment Module to investigate cross-national differences in support for climate policy. We introduce size of government, measured by government revenues as a share of GDP, as a new country-level factor. Our sample includes 31,511 responses from 33 countries. We use multilevel models to estimate the relationship between country-level factors and environmental policy support, conditional on a series of individual factors. Increasing the size of government from the 1st to the 3rd quartile reduces support for environmental policy by 0.17 points on a 5-point scale. For comparison, a 1% increase in GDP per capita also leads to 0.17 increase in support and a 1% increase in air pollution leads to a 0.38 point increase. The results for post-materialist attitudes at the country-level are insignificant but they are important predictors of policy support at the individual level. This result does not hold when support for environmental policy is framed in terms of decreased standard of living. High tax countries have an aversion to price and tax increases aimed at protecting the environment. We show that our results hold even after including a country-level measure of trust in government. Overall, we conclude that use of taxes for environmental policy must include clear expectations for how revenues will be recycled or how other taxes will be lowered if they are to gain widespread support