Influence of messaging and party affiliation on energy conservation behavior: An evaluation from the US

Abstract

Governments have numerous avenues available to them to leverage energy consumption reductions. Low-cost policy options may be as simple as incorporating information related to energy consumption reduction. Despite the viability of these low-cost options, there is little understanding of how individual characteristics influence the viability of messaging strategies. This study fills the research gap by investigating how residents' political affiliation may affect their response to utility messaging for reducing energy consumption. We use the City of Tallahassee, Florida, as a testbed to investigate how informational messages alter customers' energy consumption behavior. We examined the effects of monthly messages on a random sample of 3000 households from 2011 to 2015. Our analysis reveals that pro-environmental and cost savings frames result in different levels of energy conservation according to political affiliation. This study helps resolve previous studies' inconsistent findings by expanding the information analysis to fine-scale data observed in actual energy consumption behavior. For practitioners, our results shed new light on how to effectively alter customers' energy conservation behavior through messaging by strategically accounting for the characteristics of customers.