Social gap at the ballot box: Using a municipal referendum to understand why general support for solar energy declines

Solar energy, and renewable energy in general, receives broad public support, but specific projects continue to face significant hurdles and high rejection rates. We leverage a municipal referendum on a specific solar array to study an individual-level support gap, defined as someone who holds positive attitudes of solar energy in general but votes against this specific project. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first paper to quantitatively assess the social gap at an individual level. Using an exit poll, we find that of those having pro-solar attitudes, 28.9% voted ‘no’ and hence exhibit an individual support gap. Regression analysis indicates that those who exhibit a support gap are more likely to be middle age, have lower income, exhibit lower trust in the government, not believe in anthropogenic climate change, and have only weakly positive attitudes about solar. Our exit poll also included a survey experiment about hypothetical solar developments that varied the land use impacts and proximity of the array, which were designed to causally tease apart the relative importance of qualified support and self-interest, two proposed explanations of the social gap. The results suggest that land use concerns massively outweigh proximity concerns, suggesting that qualified support is two to three times larger of a determinant of support gap behavior than self-interest. This study provides a deeper understanding of the complexity of public opinions, which can be used by decision makers to improve outreach efforts and project outcomes.