The role of populist attitudes in explaining climate change skepticism and support for environmental protection

Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that partisanship and political ideology, writ large, are some of the most powerful explanations of attitudes towards climate change and environmental politics. While compelling, most studies focus on a narrow definition of political ideology in the US. This study adds to the literature by assessing the relationship between populism, climate skepticism, and support for environmental protection. Populism offers an orthogonal dimension to partisanship and left-right self-placement, which broadens the scope of the concept. Assessing the UK facilitates understanding the role of political ideology beyond the strong party sorting apparent in the US. Data from the 2015 British Election Study offer strong support for the proposition that populism holds a consequential role in climate and environmental politics.

Understanding public concern about climate change in Europe, 2008–2017: the influence of economic factors and right-wing populism

“…In response to this, this study has attempted to also assess the influence of populism and political ideology separately, and results were insignificant (see Annex C). What this shows overall is that, although political ideology and populist attitudes are strong predictors of climate change attitudes at the individual level (Huber, 2020;Huber et al, 2020;McCright et al, 2016), we do not see that country-level shifts to the (populist) right are so strongly associated with decreased concern both between and within countries. A reason for this could be that climate skeptic stances of right-wing populist parties are counteracted by a stronger mobilization of pro-climate movements influencing public attitudes (Caniglia et al, 2015;Hagedorn et al, 2019), but researching this is beyond the scope of this study and should provide fruitful inspiration for future research.…”

“…To address these shortcomings, three robustness checks that aimed to reduce these flaws have been performed and the results were not notably different; only the negative longitudinal effect is sometimes significant (explanations and results of these robustness checks are available in Annex C of the Supplementary Online Material). In addition, although researching the links between right-wing populism and climate change has been done previously in the literature (Ćetković & Hagemann, 2020;Lockwood, 2018), one could criticize the conflation of populism and political ideology from an analytical point of view, because results could be due to either the populism component, the ideological component, or a combination of both (Huber, 2020). In response to this, this study has attempted to also assess the influence of populism and political ideology separately, and results were insignificant (see Annex C).…”

“…The central focus of right-wing populism is on culture and nativism aiming to protect the 'native people' from 'dangerous others'. Left-wing populism, on the other hand, lacks this element and portrays the struggle between the elite and the people mainly as a class struggle where the former economically exploits the latter (Huber, 2020;Huber & Schimpf, 2017;Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013;Zulianello, 2020). Some of the core tenets of right-wing populism, in particular its tendency towards authoritarianism, relate negatively to liberal democratic quality (Mudde, 2007), which is why the rise of right-wing populism is often depicted as an unfolding crisis of liberal democracy (Forchtner, 2019).…”

“…From a theoretical point of view, both the 'right-wing' and the 'populism' component of right-wing populism generate a fertile ground for climate skepticism and hostility to climate policy. It is the abstract and technical nature of climate change, and its typically elite-driven top down discourse, that makes it easy for populists to portray the problem as illustrating the chasm between the elite and the people (Huber, 2020). The right-wing component adds authoritarianism and nationalism to the equation, whereas left-wing populism tends to express more universalist values (Lockwood, 2018;Mudde, 2007).…”

“…This increased anti-climate rhetoric might have influenced public opinion. Although previous literature suggests that political factors play an important role in climate change attitudes (Brulle et al, 2012;Mildenberger & Leiserowitz, 2017), only few studies have assessed the role of (right-wing) populism (Huber, 2020;Huber et al, 2020), and these studies focused solely on individual-level indicators. Our study adds to these seminal individual-level studies, by providing the first aggregate country-level assessment on the role of right-wing populism in explaining climate change attitudes.…”