Fairness across policy stages: How citizens evaluate costs and redistributions in carbon taxation

Carbon taxes remain politically contested despite their effectiveness in reducing emissions. A dominant explanation attributes low public support to perceived unfairness, leading policymakers and researchers to emphasise redistributive design features. Yet empirical evidence shows that redistributions often have limited effects on public support. This paper contributes to this debate by offering a broader understanding of perceptions of fairness in carbon taxation. Conceptualising it as a two-stage policy process, I distinguish between cost allocation and revenue redistribution, and examine how citizens’ perceptions vary across these stages using a survey experiment conducted in Switzerland. The results show that perceptions of fairness are structured differently in each stage. In the cost stage, variation centres on preferences for mitigating excessive burdens for vulnerable groups. In the redistribution stage, preferences differ between equal redistribution and targeted, polluter-pays schemes. These findings suggest that redistributions do not uniformly increase perceived fairness because they introduce multi-dimensional, stage-specific perceptions of fairness. For policymakers, the results imply that policy design and communication must account for these stage-specific fairness considerations, particularly in addressing cost distribution and the treatment of vulnerable groups.