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Australians' views on carbon pricing before and after the 2013 federal election

Nature Climate Change volume 5, pages 1064–1067 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

As climate policies change through the legislative process, public attitudes towards them may change as well. Therefore, it is important to assess how people accept and support controversial climate policies as the policies change over time. Policy acceptance is a positive evaluation of, or attitude towards, an existing policy1,2,3; policy support adds an active behavioural component1,3. Acceptance does not necessarily lead to support. We conducted a national survey of Australian residents to investigate acceptance of, and support for, the Australian carbon pricing policy before and after the 2013 federal election, and how perceptions of the policy, economic ideology, and voting behaviour affect acceptance and support. We found acceptance and support were stable across the election period, which was surprising given that climate policy was highly contentious during the election. Policy acceptance was higher than policy support at both times and acceptance was a necessary but insufficient condition of support. We conclude that acceptance is an important process through which perceptions of the policy and economic ideology influence support. Therefore, future climate policy research needs to distinguish between acceptance and support to better understand this process, and to better measure these concepts.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge funding support by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s Climate Adaptation Flagship; the Maine Sustainability Solutions Initiative (supported by National Science Foundation award EPS-0904155 and Maine EPSCoR at the University of Maine); and the Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station. We also thank the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, the Communication and Marketing Team in the College of the Environment (both at the University of Washington), and S. Newcomb for providing feedback on manuscript drafts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics, University of Maine, Orono, Maine 04469, USA

    Stacia J. Dreyer & Mario F. Teisl

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Maine, Orono, Maine 04469, USA

    Stacia J. Dreyer & Shannon K. McCoy

  3. Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Floreat, Western Australia 6913, Australia

    Iain Walker

  4. School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia 6009, Australia

    Iain Walker

Authors
  1. Stacia J. Dreyer
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Contributions

S.J.D. contributed to all stages of this article, as it comprised a chapter within her dissertation. I.W. and S.J.D. conceived of the study design. I.W., M.F.T. and S.K.M. jointly supervised and edited the work.

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Correspondence to Stacia J. Dreyer.

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Dreyer, S., Walker, I., McCoy, S. et al. Australians' views on carbon pricing before and after the 2013 federal election. Nature Clim Change 5, 1064–1067 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2756

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