Public support of science: A contingent valuation study of citizens' attitudes about CERN with and without information about implicit taxes

Large-scale projects in fundamental science, such as major particle colliders, radio telescopes, synchrotron light sources are promoted by scientific communities in the first place, mainly funded by governments, and ultimately by taxpayers. Little is known, however, about preferences of the latter except in the form of qualitative social attitudes survey. We suggest that understanding taxpayers' preferences in the form of their willingness to pay (a money metric) for fundamental science is feasible and informative. We have designed a contingent valuation (CV) experiment about public support of science as reflected in the preferences of Swiss taxpayers for particle physics research at CERN, the laboratory where the Higgs boson has been discovered in 2012. Differently from a previous study on the attitudes of French citizens, in this paper we propose a novel methodological framework by a dual repeated bidding mechanism where sub-samples of respondents are respectively given/not given the information on the implicit tax they already pay to support CERN in the first place. We find clear convergence of results between the groups and discuss why such a finding has policy and methodological implications for research on government funding of basic research. We compare findings in Switzerland and France. The experiment is replicable in different countries and scientific fields and opens the way to a new empirical research avenue on the public support to science.