Energy Policy

A Dutch policy raised taxes on household natural gas and recycled those revenues as subsidies for renewable energy. Radical right parties were the only organized political opposition to this policy change.

This study asks whether offering compensation to concentrated opponents can increase public support for politically difficult reforms. The authors present arguments for and against “buyouts” and then test public attitudes using survey experiments about three reform cases: phasing out coal energy, simplifying tax filing, and granting amnesty to dictators. They report that buyouts can attract majority support but that approval varies with partisanship and program design: buyouts directed to workers receive higher approval than those for firms. The abstract emphasizes that moral objections — a reluctance to reward actors who obstruct beneficial reforms — and a credibility problem (supporters’ willingness to renege on payments after reform) constrain the democratic viability of buyouts. The authors conclude that buyouts may make stalled reforms politically feasible, but their acceptability depends on careful institutional design and public perceptions.

This article asks how foreign state communications affect public attitudes about a concrete policy: whether China should be permitted to invest in nuclear power infrastructure in the United Kingdom. Using messaging derived from official Chinese news articles, the authors deploy a survey experiment to test whether publics respond differently to coercive versus persuasive signals, how perceptions of threat or economic dependence matter, and whether counter-coercion by close allies moderates effects. The contribution is an experimental test of strategic communication from a foreign state on a specific energy-investment policy question, with attention to conditional factors that might reduce or reverse messaging effects.