Public response to the regulation policy of urban household waste: Evidence from a survey of Jiangsu Province in China

Abstract

The attitudes and response of "policy receivers" should be taken into more consideration when governments make regulation policy. This paper discusses the public's degree of understanding, support willingness, implement willingness, and influence willingness to the policy, as well as the mutually responding scenario by using the quadratic response surface regression analysis from the perspective of "policy receivers". The statistics of 951 segments of valid sample data and the regression analysis suggest that: (1) 42.51% of individuals have poor understanding with regard to the command and control policy of household waste, which indicates a deficiency in the publicity effectiveness of the policy; (2) the public's understanding, support, implement, and influence of the policy present an inverted U shape change, indicating a low degree of understanding and influence willingness, and high support willingness and implement willingness; (3) overall, only support willingness can significantly affect the public's willingness to implement the policy, while both the degree of understanding and support willingness can positively predict influence willingness significantly; (4) the consistency between the degree of understanding and support willingness has an incremental effect on implement willingness and influence willingness; and (5) the implement level to the charge collection policy increases when the degree of understanding exceeds support willingness by a certain value.