There are examples that would show me wrong, like plastic grocery bag bans. But on the other hand, there haven’t been very many such bans, and banning plastic bags is a relatively minor inconvenience, and does very little to slow climate change.
This is assuming that the dissonance is hurting more than the renunciation. People are already quite good at ignoring dissonances. And the causal effects are so removed from daily experience that often there isn’t that great of a dissonance in the first place.
It’s not about “the dissonance is painful, so they seek to correct it by not voting for reduced consumption”.
It’s “voting to reduce consumption takes effort, in knowing what to vote for and in actually casting a vote, and people are unlikely to put in that effort if they are not putting in any effort elsewhere”.
“Dissonance” was a poor choice of words for what I was trying to communicate.
There is nothing wrong with this behavior. I will vote today for everyone to curb consumption, but I see no reason to make the sacrifice alone.