Shaping stable support: Leveraging digital feedback interventions to elicit socio-Political acceptance of renewable energy

Abstract

In democratic countries, the success of energy policies hinges on citizens' support and their acceptance of policy outcomes. In this study, we develop a digital feedback intervention to prompt citizens with information that visualizes the geographical distribution of wind turbines and to evaluate the effects on socio-political acceptance. In an online experiment, we exposed 430 German citizens to a personalized digital feedback intervention and elicited their acceptance of renewable wind energy. The results are threefold: First, citizens' acceptance of renewable wind energy that results from digital feedback is lower than initially claimed. Second, citizens who meaningfully engage with the digital feedback intervention are more likely to revise their acceptance of wind energy. Third, and surprisingly, citizens’ ecological attitude and place attachment to their current residence had no significant effect on the extent to which they revised their acceptance of renewable wind energy. Our results demonstrate that digital feedback interventions can act as a “sensor” for socio-political acceptance. This contributes to informing citizens about energy policy outcomes and provides valuable insights for policymakers promoting a participatory democracy paradigm.