ABSTRACT

Numerous studies have demonstrated that deliberation can affect how people think about complex policy options. In this paper, we operate on the assumption that while democratic processes cannot guarantee specific policy outcomes (without losing some of their legitimacy), certain types of democratic practices – such as deliberation – can be used to encourage people to support environmental policies. We test this assumption with an experiment that was designed to examine whether there are systematic differences in support for climate action policies among groups of people who deliberated the policies with each other and those who did not. In our experiment, 330 participants were asked to consider two policies designed to help mitigate climate change: (1) increases to the US federal gas tax; and (2) a tree planting policy. Our results show that those who deliberated became more supportive of government action on the gas tax policy, and they also became more willing to pay higher gas taxes than those who did not deliberate. These findings are consistent across model specifications and substantively significant.

摘要

大量研究表明，审议可以影响人们对复杂政策选择的看法。在本文中，我们假设民主进程不能保证特定的政策成果（在不丧失某些合法性的情况下），某些类型的民主做法（例如审议）可以用来鼓励人们支持环境政策。我们通过一项旨在检验这种假设的实验，该实验旨在研究在相互讨论和不讨论政策的人群中，对气候行动政策的支持是否存在系统性差异。在我们的实验中，要求330名参与者考虑旨在帮助缓解气候变化的两项政策：（1）增加美国联邦汽油税；（2）植树政策。我们的结果表明，那些考虑的人变得更加支持政府对天然气税政策采取的行动，并且他们也比那些没有考虑的人更愿意支付更高的天然气税。