(Un)fair to Me, (Un)fair to You? Fairness, Distribution and Policy Support
Hybrid
Policy debates are fundamentally distributive: who bears costs and who receives benefits influences perceived fairness and shapes public acceptability. Although fairness is known to correlate with environmental policy support, evidence comes mainly from wealthy Western democracies. We address this gap by examining how cost and benefit targeting affects fairness judgments and public support for environmental policies targeting urban transportation in Delhi (India) and Jakarta (Indonesia), two cities that recently experienced fairness-driven public resistance in response to government action. We field a pre-registered factorial vignette survey experiment in both cities (n = 3,400) that randomises who pays and who benefits, measuring fairness-to-me and fairness-to-others perceptions and testing heterogeneity through car-ownership interactions.

Results show that targeting benefits and costs reduces both fairness perceptions compared to universal allocations, more asymmetrically so in Jakarta. In both cities, fairness-to-me is a stronger correlate of policy support than fairness-to-others. Car ownership shifts only fairness-to-me evaluations, implying that material stakes shape self-oriented fairness without spilling over into broader societal fairness assessments. Benefit targeting under shared costs carries higher backlash risk, while targeted costs can remain viable when benefits are universal, especially where equality norms shape collective fairness independently of material stakes.
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Speaker bio: Dr. Liam F. Beiser-McGrath is an Associate Professor in International Social and Public Policy in the Department of Social Policy, Chair of the Sustainable Social Policy and Welfare States Research Hub, Associate of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and Affiliate of the Data Science Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Liam is also an Editor for the journal Environmental Politics and the organiser of EPG Online, an online seminar series covering Environmental Politics and Governance.

Liam’s research primarily focuses on the political economy of climate change, using experimental research designs and machine learning. This research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature Climate Change, the Journal of Politics, Science Advances, European Journal of Political Research, Comparative Political Studies, Political Analysis, Climatic Change, Political Science Research & Methods, Environmental Politics, Global Environmental Politics, the Journal of European Social Policy, Energy Policy, Regulation and Governance, Electoral Studies, and the Journal of Public Policy.

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Booking is required for people outside of the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI). DSPI Members do not need to register
Date: 12 March 2026, 16:00
Venue: 32-42 Wellington Square (Barnett House), 32-42 Wellington Square OX1 2ER
Venue Details: VBR Department of Social Policy and Intervention, 32 Wellington Square OX1 2ER/ Microsoft Teams
Speaker: Dr Liam Beiser-McGrath (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Organising department: Department of Social Policy and Intervention
Organisers: Professor Kenneth Nelson (University of Oxford), Professor Jane Gingrich (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: communications@spi.ox.ac.uk
Part of: DSPI Hilary Term Seminar Series 2026
Booking required?: Required
Booking url: https://forms.office.com/e/314S4C646r
Cost: Free
Audience: Public
Editors: Faith Inch, Rachel Fisher