No silver bullets? A survey experiment on the differential support for climate policy designs in the Netherlands

The implementation of a mix of pull and push measures is widely considered essential for addressing climate change. Yet, public support for push measures is often limited, constraining their adoption. It is, therefore, crucial to better understand how policy design choices can help increasing support. We employed a survey experiment among Dutch adults in the context of the 2023 parliamentary elections to investigate how design features affect public support for domain-specific carbon taxes. We find that proposing implementation at the multilateral level does not increase support, whereas earmarking tax revenues generally does. Income- or consumption-based progressive taxation do not increase support universally but instead appeal to specific subgroups of citizens. Most importantly, our findings show that policy design features are not universal tools for increasing climate policy support. Rather, their effects vary across policy domains and among citizens with different political attitudes and ideological orientations.