Event Information
The next speaker in the EEU seminar series is Fredrik Carlsson, from the Department of Economics at the Univeristy of Gothenbrug. Fredrik will present us a working paper with the title Leading by example? EU citizens’ preferences for climate leadership. You can find the abstract of the paper below.
The seminar takes place on Monday, 12.05-13.00 (Stockholm time). It will be in hybrid format, taking place in room B44 and Zoom simultaneously.
To access the seminar by zoom, please email ville.inkinen@economics.gu.se to get the link and password.
Abstract
We study climate leadership in seven European countries by investigating whether citizens want their country to take the lead and reduce carbon emissions above the current EU agreements. Our results show that most people do not expect that taking the lead will result in other countries following suit but females and people with more left-wing political views are the most optimistic. In our survey experiment, we also find strong evidence of conditional leadership: although the support varies across countries, people in all seven countries are more positive towards their country taking the lead if told that other countries will follow suit, and that support increases as the support of the followers becomes more certain. These preferences are again stronger among those who identify themselves as left-wing. Interestingly, citizens in the smaller countries with smaller emissions are those who are most sensitive to the behavior of other EU-countries. Finally, we estimate the population share that would support their country taking the lead, and find that support is very sensitive to the cost of taking the lead. With a relatively low cost, there is a majority in favor of taking the lead in five out of seven countries. However, with a more realistic cost estimate we find that a majority of people in all the surveyed EU countries oppose their country taking the lead. Our results highlight the significance of expectations of followers’ reactions and the importance of joint action and thus multilateral agreements in climate policies.