Climate Change Policy Preferences and Foreign State Behavior -- Survey Experimental Evidence on Reciprocal Defection

The Paris Agreement emphasizes transparency over individual country targets and achievements as a coordination instrument for ‘ratcheting-up’ global climate policy. Does free-riding of third countries affect public support for domestic climate policy? Citizens could reciprocate defection, but only if free-riding concerns are a binding constraint for public support. Prior literature showed that reciprocity considerations matter for agreement-making or specific climate policy support. Building on this literature and drawing on high-quality population-representative survey experiments in Switzerland (N = 3,464), I instead focus on how citizens react to the defection of important emitters from their targets. I show that citizens reciprocate strongly, reducing support for ratcheting-up, but also for basic compliance with current Swiss targets. Support declines in various societal groups. In particular, respondents with anti-climate-policy attitudes and high perceived ego- or sociotropic economic burden from the Green Transition show a particularly strong reduction in support. These results indicate that forming pro-climate coalitions among the citizenry becomes more difficult when foreign countries fail to implement their Paris targets.