Redistribution unlikely to overcome concerns about distributional effects – Experimental evidence on regulatory measures for residential building decarbonisation

While climate scientists largely agree that we are in a severe climate crisis, political leaders worldwide struggle with the drastic greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed and pledged in their international agreements. The gap between emission reductions and promises can be attributed to a lack of stringent policies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In democracies, this lack of appropriate emissions reduction policies might stem from too little public support. Previous literature on public support for strict climate mitigation policies relates this to domestic distributive conflicts about short-term policy costs, especially for market-based policy instruments. The distributive conflict over climate policies has already entered the public discourse about them, as demonstrated by the discussions of impacts on vulnerable groups (e.g., in the 2021 vote on the Swiss CO2-Act) or the distribution of costs (e.g., in the discussions on the German Building Energy Act in 2023). In these public discourses, remedies to the distributive conflicts, such as targeted redistributive measures, have not been featured equally prominently, which motivates this study. Focusing on two regulation-based policy instruments (obligation to retrofit and a ban on new fossil fuel boilers) targeting the residential building sector, this study aims to uncover if the distributive argument can obstruct public support for climate policies, and if redistributive measures can boost it again. To analyse this, we cooperate with techno-economic modellers to define two policies for the Swiss residential sector, with equal expected emissions reductions, but with different distributions of costs on tenants and homeowners. In a large-scale preregistered survey experiment (n=1875), conducted in summer 2025 in Switzerland, we informed all respondents about the effectiveness of these policy instruments before assessing their public support. We experimentally manipulate whether distributive information on financial impacts for tenants and homeowners (respectively) is provided and whether additional redistributive measures (exceptions or targeted subsidies) were included. The results from this experiment show that no redistributive measure can recover the dip in public support from the information on policy costs. Notwithstanding, there is still a majority support for banning the new installation of fossil-fuelled boilers compared to mandatory retrofitting of building envelopes. Additional (pre-registered) subgroup analyses show that those living in dwellings they own are very resistant to retrofitting their building envelopes (and neither distributive information nor redistributive measures alter this). For tenants, the pattern of reduced support through distributive information, which cannot recover from redistribution, holds for both policy instruments.