Swiss landscape quality payments (LQPs) are a form of agricultural subsidy that provides funding for
farmers engaged in maintaining or creating different elements that contribute to landscape quality. This
study is the first step to analyse the effect of different measures to increase landscape quality using four
indicators of perceived landscape quality (beauty, authenticity, uniqueness and complexity) from two
nationally representative public surveys conducted in 2011 and 2020. While most LQP categories do not
have a significant effect, both payments for productive grassland and those connected to stone structures
have an effect on more than one of the four indicators of perceived landscape quality. These payments
seem to cause a visible change in the landscape or preserve elements that are important for landscape
quality. Such payments help to provide ecosystem services, while those not causing any visible change can
be conceptualised as a form of rent-seeking. In the future, more efforts are needed to evaluate the payments
to enable evidence-based policy-making and steer payments towards measures that result in improvements
to landscape quality that are visible and notable to the public.