Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In November 2018, Washingtonians voted on Initiative 1631, which proposed to reduce pollution by levying a fee on greenhouse gas emissions and using that revenue to support air quality and energy projects, water quality and forest health initiatives. 56.3% of voters rejected the measure. More than 59% of Washingtonians also rejected a revenue-neutral carbon tax initiative (I-732) proposed in 2016.

Despite the scientific consensus on effectiveness and efficiency of taxes in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, lack of public support and political appeal is a major hindrance against imposing these taxes, even in Washington State, which is one of the eco-friendliest states in U.S. A large body of literature has studied beliefs and attitudes about climate change and willingness to pay for climate change mitigation. Some studies have found that people tend to think of climate change as a distant and remote event that does not affect their own livelihoods. This psychological distance results in lower concern and willingness to act. However, people can experience impacts of climate change in the form of extreme weather events. Many researchers have used this fact to find the impact of personally experiencing adverse effects of climate change on beliefs, perceptions, and willingness to mitigate. These studies do not provide conclusive insights. Moreover, vast majority of these studies have used stated preferences approach and survey methods to explore preferences and willingness to pay.

In this research, we use revealed preference approach by studying the voting behavior of Washington State voters on carbon tax initiatives in 2016 and 2018. In summer months of 2018, large areas of Washington State experienced poor air quality due to wildfires. Climate change contributes to larger and more frequent wildfires in Western United States through higher temperatures and more frequent droughts which lead to dry soils and stressed forests. If people attributed 2018 wildfires and 2015 severe drought to climate change, we can use the poor air quality experienced in 2018 and drought index in 2015 to explore the relationship between experience and actual support for climate mitigation policies.

We use the precinct level voting data on initiatives 1631 and 732. We also use precinct level senate vote data as a proxy for political orientation (republican vs. democrat). We apply a spatial logistic regression model to find the impact of experiencing poor air quality in 2018 and experiencing severe drought in 2015 on probability of voting "yes" on I-1631 and I-732. We find that even after considering the spatial autocorrelations, experiencing climate change significantly increases the probability of voting yes votes in a precinct. The results of OLS regression show that experiencing drought has a positive and significant effect on supporting I-732. However, after taking spatial autocorrelation into account, the coefficient of exposure to drought becomes insignificant. So, experiencing drought did not increase support for the climate change policy. This might be due to the fact that people attribute wildfires to climate change, but do not see a strong connection between climate change and drought.