Guilleaume, Dominique (2025) Balancing Perspectives in Public Participation: The Effect of Opinion-Based Diversity on Public Acceptability of Climate Policies. Research Master thesis, Research Master.
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Abstract
Climate change necessitates climate policies enabling sustainable transitions, yet public acceptability of them often remains limited. Public participation increasingly complements representative decision-making in policymaking and is expected to enhance public acceptability. However, specific design features, such as the composition of public forums, are important to achieving public acceptability of outcomes. This study examines how different forms of diversity – demographic and opinion-based – influence public acceptability, whether this is mediated by citizens’ perceptions of representation and procedural fairness, and whether participants’ own opinion about the policy topic moderates these relationships. We hypothesized that a public forum encompassing demographic representativeness as well as different opinion-based diversity on the policy – equally or representatively distributed – would lead to higher public acceptability of its recommendations than those of a forum involving demographic representativeness alone. We expected this relationship to be mediated by perceived representation and perceived procedural fairness and moderated by citizens’ opinion on the policy topic. We conducted an online vignette experiment (N = 306), introducing participants to the policy topic nuclear power before randomly assigning them to one of three public forum diversity conditions. The additional consideration of both forms of opinion-based diversity had no effect on perceived representation, perceived procedural fairness and public acceptability of the forum’s recommendations, suggesting citizens may not be as sensitive to specifics of forum composition as assumed. Both perceived representation and perceived procedural fairness were positively associated with public acceptability. Participants’ prior opinion on nuclear power did not moderate the impact of diversity type on public acceptability.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Research Master) |
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| Supervisor name: | Perlaviciute, G. |
| Degree programme: | Research Master |
| Differentiation route/Track: | Understanding Societal Change [Research Master] |
| Date Deposited: | 16 Jul 2025 11:17 |
| Last Modified: | 16 Jul 2025 11:17 |
| URI: | http://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/5560 |
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