Bergquist Magnus
Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg, Haraldsgatan 1, 413 14, Göteborg, Sweden.
Ambio. 2025 Feb;54(2):350-363. doi: 10.1007/s13280-024-02074-9. Epub 2024 Sep 17.
Costs and policy-specific beliefs, such as effectiveness and fairness, are central factors for supporting environmental taxes. Less is known about how much each of these factors is limiting support. Across four experiments, I investigate to which extent high costs, ineffectiveness, and unfairness constrain support for environmental taxes. Results consistently demonstrate that perceived unfairness poses a greater barrier to support than extensive costs or ineffectiveness. These findings were robust across three environmental taxes (meat tax, plastic tax, and carbon tax), across three cultures (USA, UK, and India), and were replicated using a representative US sample. Furthermore, delving deeper into the consequences of perceived unfairness, results showed that distributional unfairness was a stronger barrier to support than procedural unfairness. Beyond limiting support, being presented with an unfair tax proposal led participants to perceive the tax as less effective and to express lower trust in policymakers than when receiving a fairer tax proposal.
成本以及特定政策的信念，如有效性和公平性，是支持环境税的核心因素。对于这些因素中每一个对支持的限制程度，我们了解得较少。在四项实验中，我研究了高成本、无效性和不公平性在多大程度上限制了对环境税的支持。结果一致表明，感知到的不公平对支持构成的障碍比高额成本或无效性更大。这些发现在三种环境税（肉类税、塑料税和碳税）、三种文化（美国、英国和印度）中都很稳健，并且使用具有代表性的美国样本进行了重复验证。此外，深入探究感知到的不公平的后果，结果表明分配不公平比程序不公平对支持构成的障碍更强。除了限制支持外，与收到更公平的税收提案相比，面对不公平的税收提案会使参与者认为该税效果较差，并对政策制定者表达更低的信任。
