Governments and energy operators are often confronted with local residents’ protest against the construction of new high-voltage overhead transmission lines, negative risk expectations, and a lack of public support. A frequently discussed strategy for dealing with these issues is to build underground cables instead of overhead lines. So far, however, there is not much empirical evidence of whether substituting overhead lines by underground cables actually reduces protest or affects public risk expectations and attitudes. This study contributes to filling this gap by comparing residents’ risk expectations, attitudes, and protest behavior observed at two grid expansion sites in Germany by means of a quasi-experiment. At the time when the data were collected, both grid expansion projects–an overhead line project in Lower Saxony and an underground cable project in Hesse–were at the same stage of the legally defined planning and approval procedure. After controlling for various potential confounders, we obtained results revealing that there are no differences in the risk expectations, attitudes, and protest behavior of residents interviewed at the two project sites, or only marginal ones. Hence, our findings do not support the assumption that building underground cables necessarily improves the situation with regard to risk expectations, attitudes, and protest behavior.
Policymakers and transmission system operators frequently face problems when planning and constructing new high-voltage transmission lines because of opposition among local residents. Protest varies due to attributes of the transmission lines (e.g., length and size), site-specific characteristics, and the extent of consternation among local residents. The most controversially discussed grid expansion project in Germany is the SuedLink, which has been causing severe protest among groups of local residents. One driver of public opposition is the existence of local citizens’ initiatives. These groups play an important role, for example by influencing the public debate, taking legal action, or mobilizing their members and other citizens into protest. In doing so, they can cause delays due to confrontational planning and approval procedures. In order to deal with these risks, decision-makers need to know about the actual effects of citizens’ initiatives on public protest. So far, however, empirical research on these effects has been sparse. This study contributes to filling this gap by considering one specific aspect of the influence of citizens’ initiatives. It isolates the causal effects of citizens’ initiative membership on members’ individual protest behavior in the context of the SuedLink. Controlling for various potential confounders, our results clearly indicate that the probability of performing protest behavior and the intensity of protest are substantially larger for members of citizens’ initiatives than for non-members.