Climate change policy preferences and foreign state behavior – survey experimental evidence on reciprocal defection

Abstract The Paris Agreement emphasizes transparency over individual country targets and achievements as a coordination instrument for ‘ratcheting up’ global climate policy. Does free-riding of third countries affect public support for domestic climate policy? Citizens could reciprocate defection, but only if free-riding concerns are a binding constraint on public support. Prior literature indicates that reciprocity considerations matter for agreement-making or specific climate policy support. Building on this literature and drawing on high-quality population-representative survey experiments in Switzerland ( $$N=3{,}464$$ ), I instead focus on how citizens react to the defection of important emitters from target achievement. I show that citizens reciprocate strongly, reducing support for ratcheting up, but also for basic compliance with current Swiss targets. Respondents with anti-climate-policy attitudes and high perceived ego- or sociotropic economic burden from the Green Transition show a particularly strong reduction in support, while I find no indication that defection induces a counterbalancing logic among most-likely subgroups. These results indicate that distributional and free-riding concerns interact, and that forming pro-climate coalitions might become more difficult when foreign countries fail to implement their Paris targets.