The social acceptance of airport expansion scenarios: A factorial survey experiment

•A survey-based experiment on different economic and non-economic factors.•Taking justice impacts – procedural and distributive justice – into account.•Using a range of social acceptance measures including fairness and activism intentions.•Combining survey data with objective data on aircraft noise exposure. Against the background of growing aviation and protests against air traffic in many countries, we employ a factorial survey experiment to examine the social acceptance of airport expansion scenarios in two European cities located near the international airports of Frankfurt (Germany) and Zurich (Switzerland), respectively. In our experiment, respondents evaluated short descriptions of airport expansion scenarios that varied in several impact attributes. The experiment helps to disentangle to what extent environmental impacts (aircraft noise), economic impacts (job creation), participatory justice aspects (participation opportunities), and distributive justice aspects (noise distribution) affect social acceptance. The experimental results show that environmental and participatory justice aspects are much more influential than economic and distributive justice impacts. Higher expected exposure to aircraft noise and less opportunities of citizen participation in an aircraft expansion project lead to increased levels of expressed unfairness of the expansion, to a greater willingness to sign a petition, to participate in a demonstration, and to vote against the expansion. Combining survey data and data on actual noise exposure, we find that those with very low and very high actual exposure levels, respectively, express the lowest social acceptance. Further analyses reveal that age, environmental concern, own use of air travel, and perceived fairness of the local aircraft noise distribution explain heterogeneity in social acceptance.