From Populism to Climate Scepticism: The Role of Institutional Trust and Attitudes towards Science

Abstract

Why do populists oppose climate change? While initial research established the relationship between populism and climate attitudes, data constraints limited the ability to test different causal pathways against each other. We argue that populist attitudes affect climate attitudes through two distinct channels, namely institutional trust and attitudes towards science. The former argument focuses on political institutions as the central actors in implementing climate policy. If one is to distrust these institutions, individuals are more likely to believe that climate change does not exist, is less dangerous than often portrayed, and/or that it isn’t attributable to humankind. The latter argument claims that populists deny climate change because they distrust the underlying climate science. According to this view, populists would view climate scientists as part of the self-serving elite that betrays the people. Utilising new data from the Austrian National Election Study and structural equation modelling, we find strong support for the relationship of populism and climate attitudes via attitudes towards science. The relationship via institutional trust is substantially weaker. Populists systematically hold more negative attitudes towards science and consequently deny climate change.

From populism to the “plandemic”: why populists believe in COVID-19 conspiracies

“…Scholars and academic experts are seen as part of a technocratic elite (Caramani 2017) that holds power over the questions of "truth" and is not legitimized by the virtuous "people," thus, being part of the plot against them (see Mede and Schäfer 2020). This antagonism between the populist world-view and scientific evidence has previously been identified as the source of populists' climate change denial (Fraune and Knodt 2018;Huber, Greussing, and Eberl 2020) and vaccine hesitancy (Kennedy 2019). It becomes even more relevant in times where scientific knowledge forms the basis of policy decisions but is not at all easy to follow as it is often characterized by uncertainty, unpredictability, and incomplete control (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993).…”

Social distancing, politics and wealth

“…Very intuitively, individuals who are more likely to believe in these conspiracies are less likely to comply with containment measures and social distancing because they do not believe that COVID-19 is a real concern or social distancing will not be effective against the conspired origins of the disease. The adverse effect of populist world-view on trusting scientific experts' advice has also been documented in other types of pressing issues, such as climate change denial (Huber et al 2020) and anti-vaccination movements (Kennedy 2019).…”

Could Closing the Knowledge Gap Help in Reducing Global Environmental Impacts of Local Consumption?

“…Malka, Krosnick and Langer (2009) find for the US context that party affiliation and the level of trust in science of survey respondents matters -increased knowledge is associated with increased concern about climate change only for those respondents who either trust the information provided by scientists or who identify as Democrats or Independents. For the Swiss context, we do not expect a comparable level of political polarisation, but the effect of trust in science could still be relevant (Huber, Greussing and Eberl (2021), but see Diamond, Bernauer and Mayer (2020)). As shown in Appendix Table A.7, trust in science does not moderate the treatment effects 5 .…”