More than Symbols: the Effect of Symbolic Policies on Climate Policy Support

As the effects of climate change become increasingly salient, the need for stringent climate policies has become more pressing. However, the implementation of such policies is often met with resistance from the public due to their perceived costs and distributional implications. To address this challenge, scholars have mostly focused on the material compensations that can be leveraged to increase public support among policy losers. In this paper, we go beyond existing literature by testing the effects of symbolic climate policies. We conceptualize symbolic policies as having low material and behavioral impacts on individuals but high symbolic effects. We argue and show that policies symbolically targeting the carbon-intensive behavior of privileged social groups increase support for costly climate policies by appealing to feelings of unfairness and resentment towards these groups. We demonstrate our argument using a survey experiment among a representative sample of the French population, complemented by qualitative interviews.