How can policy design increase public support for maximum income? A qualitative vignette experiment

Can a radical and innovative policy idea such as a maximum income become a real alternative? Despite increased public awareness of the unprecedented ecological crises and the urgent need to transform our current ways of regulating economic activities, few eco-social policies with true transformative potentials have been introduced. Recent surveys have suggested that public support for maximum income is low, but they lack to explain this phenomenon. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating how people reason about the idea of maximum income-designed as an eco-social policy in this study-and how different policy designs affect public support. A methodology based on qualitative vignettes was used to understand people's preferences, and it embedded an experimental section in which 6 different policy designs were presented to the respondents. Preliminary findings show that 3 logics of thinking exist among the participants: the egalitarians, the supporters of redistribution and the opponents of limits. Furthermore, three components of policy design have a strong impact on public support: a maximum income with a low amount triggers strong rejection while a list of eco-social redistributive measures and a regulation at the European level increase support for the policy. In short, these results show how policy design impacts public support and suggest that support for maximum income could be much higher than what has been estimated so far.