International commitments and domestic opinion: the effect of the Paris Agreement on public support for policies to address climate change

摘要

How might voluntary international commitments affect domestic support for costly policies to address climate change? We investigated this question by studying the effect of the Paris Agreement on the American public. Our survey experiments supported three conclusions. First, voluntary international commitments shaped public opinion; public support for emissions control policies was much higher in scenarios where the U.S. government had joined the Paris Agreement than in scenarios where it had not. This effect held not only in the population as a whole, but also by political party. Second, although international agreements were influential in general, they were most effective at changing majority opinion about policies with intermediate costs. Finally, our experiments exposed the dangers of promising too much (overpledging) or too little (underpledging). These findings have important implications for the design and consequences of international agreements.