When and Why Do People Accept Public-Policy Interventions? An Integrative Public-Policy-Acceptance Framework

The successful introduction of public policies to prompt behavior change hinges on the degree to which citizens endorse the proposed policies. Although there is a large body of research on psychological determinants of public policy acceptance, these determinants have not yet been synthesized into an integrative framework that proposes hypotheses about their interplay. In this article, we develop a review-based, integrative public-policy-acceptance framework that introduces the desire for governmental support as a motivational foundation in public-policy acceptance. The framework traces the route from problem awareness to policy acceptance and, ultimately, policy compliance. We propose this relationship to be mediated by a desire for governmental support. We integrate numerous key variables assumed to qualify the relationship between problem awareness and the desire for governmental support, such as control attributions, trust, and value fit, as well as the relationship between the desire for governmental support and policy acceptance, such as perceived policy effectiveness, intrusiveness, and fairness. We exemplify the use of the proposed framework by applying it to climate policies.