Does lobbying discourage individuals from fighting climate change?

Raphael Epperson

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2025, vol. 117, issue C

Abstract: Lobbying is commonly expected to reduce climate protection. Does such a belief affect individuals’ own climate protection efforts? According to conditional cooperation, for example, it should discourage individuals from contributing. I investigate this issue of high policy relevance using an online experiment with a large heterogeneous sample from the German population. To identify the causal effect of citizens’ beliefs about the impact of lobbying on climate protection, I induce exogenous variation in these beliefs and measure subsequent individual behavior. I find some evidence for a discouragement effect: Expecting a more negative impact of lobbying reduces individual contributions to climate protection. While not all considered behaviors show a significant effect, treatment differences consistently point in the same direction. These results emphasize the risk of spillover effects through citizens’ beliefs and lend support to a more holistic approach when evaluating the consequences of lobbying or climate policies.

Keywords: Beliefs; Climate change; Experiment; Lobbying; Pro-environmental behavior; Spillover (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D62 H41 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214804325000394
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:117:y:2025:i:c:s2214804325000394

DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2025.102372

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza

More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().