Unpopular policies get an easier ride once passed

From restricting car use in cities to implementing outdoor smoking bans, policy efforts to change people's daily routines are not always well received by the public. In fact, sometimes they're even met with clear resistance.

What happens after such policies actually come into practice, though, can be a different matter entirely. Writing in PNAS, Armin Granulo and colleagues find that public resistance drops significantly post-implementation of new policies — suggesting that even unpopular policies may have an easier time sticking around once passed.

In the first study, the team analysed EU survey data comprising almost 50,000 responses from 2005 and 2006, examining public support for indoor workplace smoking bans by tracking whether support changed more in countries where bans had already been implemented compared to those where they had not. They found the public was more strongly opposed to a smoking ban in countries where the policy was planned for the coming year — but that in countries like Belgium and Scotland, where smoking bans were at that point being introduced, public opposition dropped considerably afterwards. This suggests that seeing a policy in action can reduce initial resistance.

In a second study, 719 participants were asked to imagine a 30% tax increase on cars, alcohol, or meat, and told the policy would either be introduced in the future or had already been implemented. Participants then rated their anger towards the government on a likert scale. Across all three policy areas, analyses revealed that participants expressed significantly more anger when the policy was yet to be implemented. These findings were replicated in two further studies, with UK and German participants, who showed similar resistance to new vaccine mandates and speed limits when policies were still in the planning phase compared to after they were in place.

In order to get an idea of exactly why resistance declines after implementation, the team conducted another experiment, this time with 600 participants who were asked to imagine a ban on commuting to work by car. They rated their anger at the policy, perceived personal losses, and the perceived societal benefits, similar to the previous studies.

In line with those earlier findings, those told the policy was not yet in place reported higher feelings of personal loss and were less focused on societal benefits. Those who heard the ban had already been implemented, however, were more likely to focus on the broader benefits to society.

It's this framing of viewing policy as a personal loss when it's still hypothetical that the team believes may explain the heightened initial resistance to change. As co-author Robert Böhm noted in a press release, "people initially focus on what they will lose: freedom, habitual behaviour, comfort. After the introduction, these personal losses recede into the background. We are then much more conscious of the societal gains — for example, for public health or climate protection."

In a final study, the researchers tested whether this anticipatory anger could be reduced. Here, 622 participants were assigned to either a control or an intervention group; both read a vignette about the car commuting ban, with only the intervention group being told the policy aimed to improve health, reduce emissions, and enhance public safety. This prosocial framing significantly reduced anger compared to the control, suggesting again that carefully adhering to particular framing of a policy can influence public acceptance, even before it's implemented.

Overall, the findings indicate that, while people may initially resist new policy decisions for fear of negative impacts on their lifestyles, this may often be a temporary problem. For policymakers tackling urgent issues like climate change or pandemics, this could be a valuable insight: short-term backlash doesn't necessarily mean long-term opposition, making potentially unpopular policies much less risky to pursue (even if it does still leave them open to future criticism). Future research could explore how policy resistance interacts with other factors like general trust in government, which was not accounted for here.

Read the paper in full:
Granulo, A., Fuchs, C., & Böhm, R. (2025). Psychological reactance to system-level policies before and after their implementation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(18). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2409907122

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