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Right-wing populism and the climate change agenda: exploring the linkages
Abstract
The rise of right-wing populism (RWP) poses a challenge for the climate agenda, as leaders and supporters tend to be climate sceptics and hostile to policy prescribing action on climate change. However, there is a surprising dearth of research that investigates the nature and causes of this association. Two kinds of explanation are considered, drawing on the literature on populism. One is termed ‘structuralist’, drawing on accounts of the roots of populism in economic and political marginalisation amongst those ‘left behind’ by globalisation and technological change. A second focuses on the ideological content of RWP, especially its antagonism between ‘the people’ and a cosmopolitan elite, with climate change and policy occupying a symbolic place in this contrast. It is argued that there are limits to the structuralist approach, and that an ideologically based explanation is more compelling. An agenda for future research on RWP and climate science and policy is proposed.
... Far-right ideologies have promoted (pseudo) environmental stances by framing nature as a symbolic, sentimental or identity-bound national value (Lubarda, 2020;Forchtner and Kølvraa, 2015a). They have also advanced anti-elitist and anti-European critiques of international environmental policies (Forchtner, 2019a;Lockwood, 2018), intersecting these with issues such as gender equality and science scepticism (Lubarda and Forchtner, 2022). Far-right discussions of environmental issues are marked by a certain duality, mirroring a broader duality at the heart of many far-right political positions. ...
... Nevertheless, the far right's approach to environmental issues is marked by ambivalence and diversity. On the one hand, far-right actors often frame climate change as an agenda enforced by elites (Jylhä et al., 2020;Lockwood, 2018;Van Boven and Sherman, 2021). On the other, they depict nature as a symbol of national identity and territorial sovereignty (Forchtner, 2019b;Kyriazi, 2019). ...
... Anti-elitism drives far-right scepticism towards scientific knowledge, particularly in the context of climate change and environmental protection (Eberl et al., 2021;Engels et al., 2013). Many far-right actors dismiss climate change as a fiction perpetuated by elites (including scientists) to manipulate the public (Lockwood, 2018). This denialism mirrors broader patterns of science scepticism, such as the backlash against scientists during the COVID-19 pandemic (Eberl et al., 2021;Rutjens et al., 2021). ...
Purpose-This paper aims to study how the concept of sustainability has been redefined by far-right political actors to shed light on the discrepancy between their ideological profiles and political agendas. On the one hand, far-right politicians tend to use certain aspects of sustainability-such as green narratives-to capture the public's attention and enter the mainstream political debate. At the same time, they often question climate change and, consequently, sustainable energy transition policies. Despite their ideological opposition to sustainability-related policies and their characteristic mistrust of science, far-right politicians appear to support certain sustainable goals. Design/methodology/approach-Designed as a case study, this paper examines the discourse of a specific political party-Kotlebovci-People's Party Our Slovakia (ĽSNS)-over an 11-year period (2013-2023), using a data set comprising 7,769 claims collected from the party's official newspaper. The data set used in this research is based on 44 issues of the ĽSNS newspaper Our Slovakia (Naše Slovensko), published irregularly between 2013 and 2023. Findings-The findings suggest that the Slovakian far right is currently engaging in political greenwashing, incorporating nationalist, protectionist and exclusivist elements into the very notion of sustainability. The paper also shows how the Slovak far-right political party ĽSNS uses political greenwashing to incorporate and redefine the United Nations (UN) sustainability goals into its agenda to join the mainstream discussion. Practical implications-The research contributes to the academic discussion on the crucial question of broader political support for the universality of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It addresses how far-right political actors contribute to the ideological tainting of universal and global concepts with nationalist and protectionist/exclusive features, as well as the "twisting" of various aspects of sustainability policies. Social implications-The development of public debate involving the ideological tainting of the sustainability concept by the far right has potentially severe consequences for how the SDGs will be politically addressed, supported and achieved, as well as the impact of practical and policy sustainability solutions. Originality/value-The case study of the Slovak context is highly relevant to this topic, as previous research suggests that the far right tends to incorporate ideological positions into environmental and ecological arguments. Moreover, sustainability has been at the centre of political attention, particularly following the Paris Agreement, making it a suitable example of a policy area where the far right's entry into public discussion from an ideologically determined position may be highly influential.
... Limited scholarly work has been accorded to explaining how and why citizen movements and groups react with hostility to climate policy implementation in cities, and how, more exactly, they engage and influence public decision-making over time (Gerbaudo, 2023;Bergem, 2022). There is, however, an increasing quantitative literature that explores citizen opposition or support to diverse climate policies with survey methodology (Drews et al., 2016;Saelen & Aasen, 2023) as well as an emerging literature on why and how right-wing populist groups and political parties are in opposition to the climate agenda, and influence climate policies once they are in position (Huber et al., 2022;Kulin et al., 2021;Huber, 2020;Lockwood, 2018). This rising protest and hostility among diverse social groups at establishment political institutions has been observed by many scholars to disrupt the politics and implementation of climate-related policies in Scandinavia (Böcker et al., 2024;Saelen & Aasen, 2023;Krange et al., 2019;2021;Nilsson et al., 2016) and beyond (Huber et al., 2022;Drews et al., 2016;Kulin et al., 2021). ...
... While our four groups are neither right-wing nor fully populist, they display dimensions of populist rhetoric, and, as such, we take inspiration from the populist literature's 'attitudinal approach' regarding how the action groups adopt specific political attitudes, mobilize supporters and develop group identity and programs . The analytical framework suggests that popular protests are the result of a combination of ideological/value-based arguments and socio-economic concerns (Lockwood, 2018). We further unpack and specify the ideological dimension on how popular protest leadership mobilize support and engagement on several contested areas. ...
... There is an emerging interest in the literature to provide frameworks that link climate change politics and political attitudes and rhetoric to popular protest movement and populist groups/parties and how popular protest/populism, particularly on the right, affects public institutions and liberal democratic climate governance Huber et al., 2022;Huber, 2020;Lockwood, 2018). Here we construct a framework and apply this to four differently reactive protest action groups or movements. ...
In this article, we unpack and compare how differently reactive protest groups and movements respond to climate‐related policy implementation and engage with public institutions to raise grievances and change the course of climate action. We argue that as the climate agenda has become integrated into broad‐based policies, such as urban densification and transport/road‐tolls, a range of contestations emerges that cannot be reduced to anti‐elite sentiments and climate scepticism, as often held in studies of populism and climate politics. The article offers an analytical framework to study how such reactive protest movements and their leadership respond to climate‐related policy implementation in several distinct areas of contestation. The approach is tested with empirical observations from four case studies of popular protests in four Scandinavian cities. We found that the hostility and grievances of the protesters included a mix of ideological and material/socio‐economic concerns not perceived, recognised or responded to by public institutions. Citizen action groups thus actively engaged with a diversity of public agencies and politicians to influence climate‐related decisions and actions. We observed that these interactions and resulting effects were highly place‐based and context‐specific, and dynamic. We suggest that engaging with popular/populist climate politics needs to observe changing contextual circumstances and more firmly distinguish between responsiveness to economic, cultural recognition/identity, anti‐elitist and knowledge foundations it is entangled in. This includes aspects related to the procedural functioning of public institutions and officials. Relationships are complex and multilayered. A processual and qualitative multi‐case study approach facilitated these observations.
... The literature provides different explanations for the motivation behind far-right positions on climate change and renewable energy. Usually, the key explanatory factors emphasized are, as discussed above, ideological ones: For Lockwood (2018), it is mainly anti-elitist sentiment that drives far-right climate obstruction. For Forchtner and Kølvraa (2015), it is anti-globalism and the denial of transnational risks that make the party family dismissing climate change. ...
... The heterogeneity of positions is striking given prevalent ideological explanations for far-right climate skepticism in the literature which would make us expect finding largely similar positions (e.g. Forchtner and Kølvraa 2015, Lockwood 2018, Hanson 2024. However, our findings underline the diversity, and in some cases volatility, of far-right stances towards solar energy. ...
... In many contexts though, there is a lack of strategic incentive to do so, given the pro-climate positions, at least rhetorically, of almost all other parties. However, far-right parties certainly link their anti-renewable positions with well-known ideological elements, for example economic criticism (Küppers 2022), a rejection of EU politics (Forchtner and Özvatan 2022), the protection of the local environment (Forchtner and Olsen 2023), or anti-elitism more generally (Lockwood 2018). ...
Far-right parties increasingly mobilize against climate action. While scholarship has initially focused on explicit climate denialism, by now research analyzes the opposition against specific climate policies. This article studies far-right parties' positions on solar energy, the fastest growing renewable energy source in Europe. First, we examine the crucial case of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a prominent example of climate obstruction. Second, we explore ten additional far-right parties from eight western European countries as shadow cases. Methodologically, we analyze 61 manifestos (2014-2023). The article makes three key contributions: First, it shows how far-right parties frame solar power. Second, it underlines the heterogeneity of positions among far-right parties over space and time. Third, it argues that variation in opposition and support indicates that positions towards solar power are driven rather by strategic considerations than by a common coherent ideological stance-an important finding for understanding far-right climate obstruction more broadly.
... Two contrastive explanations of social opposition to climate policy are proposed: directly structural and indirectly ideological (Lockwood, 2018). The first posits that structural changes in the global economy cause opposition to climate policy. ...
... This explanation also encompasses the general idea that elites are corrupted by special interests represented by climate scientists and environmentalists. Lockwood (2018) tentatively finds the second explanation most compelling. ...
... Moreover, as experts have expressed, energy transition requires difficult decisions that entail painful political costs in the short term. As the experts indicated, the lack of political will to pursue energy transition can be seen as a sign of populism, aligning with literature indicating that populist governments often prioritize national sovereignty and economic interests over environmental policies perceived as externally imposed (Lockwood, 2018;Taggart, 2000). Altogether, both Poland and Hungary can serve as cases of environmental nativism, with attention placed on the countries' interests, endangered by externally imposed policies. ...
This study investigates whether the reluctance toward energy transition in Poland and Hungary-countries considered populist, supportive of traditional energy models, and laggards in European Union climate policy-is due to ideological or structural reasons. Despite sharing several characteristics, these countries differ in their energy mixes. We collected views from 40 high-profile experts (20 per country) through in-depth interviews to identify the aims articulated in the discourse on energy transition. The experts' perspectives were assembled into country-specific narratives and analyzed using the methodological frame of: (1) push factors (negative conditions) and (2) pull factors (positive prospects) by interpreting the identified aims). Differences in how both countries articulate their energy policy aims according to experts' narratives analyzed through a push/pull lens suggest that structural conditions-such as technical infrastructure and economic interests-fuel opposition to energy transition ambitions. For example, energy sovereignty is Hungary's country-specific energy policy aim, while economic competitiveness serves this role in Poland. However, similarities such as concerns about energy security, affordability, and efficiency-suggest the significance of ideological factors. Therefore, the study has yet to offer a definite answer to the reasons for energy transition reluctance. Moreover, our research has shown that both countries can serve as cases of environmental nativism, with attention focused on the interests of the nations endangered by the externally imposed policy; however, the experts' narratives underscoring the security point out environmental and energy justice aspects of the energy transition.
... The protests erupted in response to a carbon tax increase and were fueled by earlier tax cuts for affluent individuals, demonstrating the potential for public backlash against climate policies perceived as unfair 4,5 . Numerous other countries have experienced similar public backlash against climate policies 6,7 . ...
... Perceptions of inequality and disadvantage are also subject to cognitive biases [30][31][32][33] . People may have an overly pessimistic perception of disadvantage, due to the prevalent narrative of populist parties that the "ordinary people" are being taken advantage of by a "corrupt elite" 6,33,34 . A preference for populism is often associated with subjective disadvantage, and populist movements consistently oppose climate policy 6,9,[35][36][37][38] . ...
... People may have an overly pessimistic perception of disadvantage, due to the prevalent narrative of populist parties that the "ordinary people" are being taken advantage of by a "corrupt elite" 6,33,34 . A preference for populism is often associated with subjective disadvantage, and populist movements consistently oppose climate policy 6,9,[35][36][37][38] . In light of this major contemporary issue, communicating accurate trends in inequality reduction or highlighting policies that effectively address inequality might be beneficial. ...
While social inequality limits the less affluent’s ability to support climate action, we develop a theoretical framework that analyzes how disadvantageous inequality aversion diminishes motivation for climate cooperation among the broader population. By clarifying how perceptions of disadvantage or social injustice can harm climate cooperation or produce backlash, we derive tailored countermeasures to enhance climate cooperation.
... In particular, populism is commonly blamed for the inability of the far right to address climate change properly. Lockwood (2018), for example, argues that narratives of denial and scepticism prevail since the complex and global character of climate change provokes right-wing populists to portray transnational climate policy and expert-based climate science as an agenda of corrupt cosmopolitan elites. Huber (2020) suggests that empirical evidence offers "ample support for the claim that individuals who strongly exhibit populist attitudes also tend to be more sceptical concerning climate change" (p. ...
... Essentially, this is attributed to the abstract, complex, and global character of climate change itself, which is hardly experienceable, in contrast to weather, and invites populist obstruction. As Lockwood (2018) argues, "RWP [right-wing populism] constructs elites as 'liberal' and cosmopolitan. [...] Climate change is the cosmopolitan issue par excellence" (p. ...
... When emphasising the downsides of climate policies, the far right repeatedly warns against the economic consequences of climate change mitigation. Contrary to Lockwood's (2018) claim that "left wing populism [...] constructs elites as [...] captured by business leaders" (p. 723) rather than right-wing populism, the far right portrays green business as greedy elites seeking to profit from ecological modernisation. ...
Denial and far-right populism are regularly blamed for the inability of liberal democracies in the Global North to address climate change properly. But what is the nexus of populism and climate obstruction? In this article, I explore how ideational and discursive approaches to populism illuminate mechanisms of climate obstruction. While ideational approaches erroneously imply that there is a line of climate political conflict between “bad” populism and “good” anti-populism, discursive approaches suggest a contingent and relational character of populism, anti-populism, and climate obstruction. They not only enable raising awareness of the strategic–authoritarian character of far-right obstruction and the prevalence of obstruction beyond the far right but also prompt that anti-populist responses qua anti-populism contribute to obstruction by depoliticising climate politics. Eco-populist responses to obstruction that feature a political–strategic proximity to discursive approaches to populism, however, overlook an unresolved tension between agendas of inclusion via economic growth and agendas of ecological limitation. By ignoring this tension, they fail to capture societal boundaries of transformation, and they spread unwarranted strategies to break through climate obstruction politically. Therefore, I argue that instead of establishing a conflict line or a contingent relation, far-right obstruction, anti-populist, and eco-populist responses result in a tacit alliance in climate obstruction. To overcome this deadlock, I suggest research on (far-right) climate obstruction to focus on multiple entanglements of authoritarian defences of an unsustainable and imperial mode of living.
... Moreover, we observe that far-right affiliates in protectionist regimes show no intention to support governmental initiatives. This findings mirror previous results on far-right ideology and environmental attitudes (Lockwood, 2018;Huber, 2020;Huber et al., 2020). ...
... Some sectors may reject environmental actions (Lockwood, 2018), while others far right partisans, particularly in rural areas, may show greater support (e.g., Sabbagh, 2005;Hamilton et al., 2010;Lubarda, 2023). ...
The main objective of this research is to investigate the relationship between welfare regimes, political affiliations, and their impact on attitudes towards environmental protection. We consider differences at the national level, changes over time, and factors at the individual level. We analyze both governmental and nongovernmental environmental efforts to determine if they complement each other or are in opposition. The findings underscore variations in environmental actions anchored to the nature of the welfare state and the prevailing political ideologies. Specifically, countries characterized by protectionist regimes demonstrate stronger governmental involvement in environmental efforts, whereas liberal states predominantly endorse nonstate-led initiatives. Political transitions significantly dictate climate action support. Our temporal analysis reveals that a shift towards right-leaning governance corresponds with a diminished inclination towards endorsing environmental mechanisms. Within this context, nations with a prevailing right-leaning political paradigm manifest reduced commitment to formal environmental policies, yet witness heightened advocacy for climate-related protests. In contrast, countries under a predominant left-leaning political regime exhibit amplified support for environmental strategies. Furthermore, individuals with left-leaning ideologies consistently express a stronger preference for environmental initiatives as opposed to their right-leaning counterparts. Remarkably, in nations plagued by pronounced inequality and overt corruption, there exists a diminished willingness to finance environmental taxes. However, there is an augmented predisposition towards endorsing environmental demonstrations.
... The dominant branch of literature on the PFRPs' attitude towards the climate change issue suggests that in Europe, this party family is often associated with climate change denial or at least climate change scepticism (Jylhä and Hellmer 2020;Jylhä, Strimling and Rydgren 2020). Similar to their opposition to an elite-imposed 'feminist' agenda, a significant part of the anti-climate rhetoric is embedded in a broad meta-political discourse that again reflects the 'corrupt elites' vs. the 'pure people' distinction (Lockwood 2018). Climate protection is seen by the PFRPs as imposed by international elites, which are disconnected from the local context and from the problems of the local citizens. ...
... ). Most PFRPs typically oppose the sort of transnational arrangements and multi-national agreements required to fight climate change effectively(Lockwood 2018;Hess and Renner 2019; Fortchtner 2019a). Some PFRPs, while accepting the existence of climate change, oppose mitigation policies or promote only national mitigation policies that do not entail transnational arrangements(Jeffries 2017;Ruser and Machin 2019;Schaller and Carius 2019). ...
... The association of party preference and ideological background of respondents has been repeatedly taken into account when investigating attitudes towards climate change and non-heteronormative ways of life. In general, individuals preferring right-wing ideologies are more often skeptical concerning the causes and consequences of climate change [8,11,23,39] and less liberal toward non-heteronormative ways of life (see literature review by Godø et al. [40] and Ayoub & Stoeckl [41]); however, this relationship appears to be more relevant in Western European countries than in Eastern European countries [8,23]. Gregersen et al. [23] refer to the lower relevance of the respondents' place on the left-right spectrum in Eastern European countries and to the different labeling of parties in various countries. ...
... This becomes even more problematic in worldwide comparisons, as the cross-cultural study by Lewis et al. [9] demonstrated. Moreover, using the case of political parties in Austria, Tosun & Debus [42] have demonstrated that, in some cases, right-wing parties may even argue in favor of measures against climate change when this fits their elite blaming discourse (see also [39]). Recent research on conservative voting among LGBTIQ people [43] has also made clear that, though the combination of conservative values and LGBTIQ identity is rare, these are not mutually exclusive. ...
Research on polarization is a contested issue in itself. One key question in this context is how strongly attitude patterns must be linked to socio-structural characteristics in order to justify speaking of polarized attitudes. Moreover, evidence of an association between attitudes may reveal ways of triggering clusters of attitudes, which can then easily be turned into affective polarization by political leaders. We investigate the prevalence of different, potentially polarizing attitude patterns among social groups in four European countries (Sweden, Austria, Italy, and Poland) using data from the European Social Survey 10. We link two sets of attitudes, namely attitudes towards climate change and attitudes towards non-heteronormative ways of life, to build four ideational types of attitude patterns. Our findings point to some associations between the two scales, which leads us to examine influence factors by Multinomial regression in the next step. High education of respondents and being female raise awareness for climate change and increase tolerance for non-heteronormative ways of life. Moreover, we find some evidence of a rural-urban divide in that residents of urban areas seem to be more open towards non-heteronormative ways of life. We argue that the analysis of mixed attitude types can be especially instructive since country effects and personal experience prove to be influential in these cases. It is precisely these cases that can tell us much about means of tackling polarization.
... Unfortunately, the timing coincided with a spike in oil prices, fostering a perception that the tax significantly contributed to the surge in gas prices (Harrison, 2013 Since these parties have a great distrust towards international institutions and binding agreements. For them, climate policy is an imposition from the liberal, cosmopolitan elites (Lockwood, 2018). In this context, Tan parties' position on climate change is more a reaction against what they perceive as a Gal/green/cosmopolitan plot than an alternative view of environmentalism (Gemenis et al., 2012). ...
... Since their nationalistic ideology romanticizes the national landscapes, they tend to promote conservationist measures at the local level (Lockwood, 2018). Gemenis et al. (2012) corroborate with this argument, they researched the party manifestos of 13 extreme-Tan parties, and found that although all of them defended that their country should be free of pollution, most parties denied that climate change was man-made, and only the Swedish Democrats were in favor of environmental taxes. ...
This research develops classification trees, a machine learning method, to interpret and predict the implementation and variation of carbon taxes in Europe. As our planet’s temperature increases and the effects of climate change intensify, an increasing number of governments are implementing carbon pricing measures to reduce emissions. Carbon taxes are an interesting mechanism, as they are simple to introduce, generate revenue, and have been proven to reduce emissions. Despite these merits, as of 2020, only 21 countries worldwide have implemented carbon taxes, with 15 of those situated in Europe, and many of these taxes feature comparatively low rates. To better understand this intricate landscape, the
classification trees are utilized to investigate two hypotheses concerning the effects of cabinet ideology and the influence of green parties on carbon tax implementation and price variation. By incorporating ideological features into the models, this research recognizes that carbon taxes do not exist in a political vacuum, and that the advice of economists and environmentalists only goes so far. The two models related to the price variation demonstrated the importance of the green parties performance in the election, although their presence in cabinet does not prevent price decreases. Interestingly, no cabinet that experienced a substantial vote share for green parties and did not have very low government debt decrease their carbon taxes. The models also indicated that being a Right-wing cabinet does not prevent price increases, and that earmark revenues are associated with carbon tax increases. On the other hand, the decision tree model for the tax’s implementation demonstrated the importance of the Left-Right cleavage when the GDP per capita (PPP) is lower than 39 thousand dollars. In wealthier countries, the creation of a carbon tax was associated with a strong liberal democratic system, the absence of a crippling debt burden, the occurrence of a natural disaster during the cabinet's tenure, and not being completely relying on fossil fuels for energy consumption. The ideological features were deemed relevant to the three models, further demonstrating the importance of political considerations in the realm of climate policy research.
... As for the main topics of interest, anti-climate actors exhibited a distinct focus on discussions that frame climate debate in a strongly political dimension with a particular focus on the theme of free speech and censorship. The focus on issues related to freedom of speech and mainstream media among anti-climate actors reflects a broader existing narrative that highlights resistance to perceived mainstream media censorship and raises concerns over elite dominance in public discourse [43]: this narrative is common in right-leaning circles [43], where much anti-climate rhetoric finds resonance [44]. ...
... As for the main topics of interest, anti-climate actors exhibited a distinct focus on discussions that frame climate debate in a strongly political dimension with a particular focus on the theme of free speech and censorship. The focus on issues related to freedom of speech and mainstream media among anti-climate actors reflects a broader existing narrative that highlights resistance to perceived mainstream media censorship and raises concerns over elite dominance in public discourse [43]: this narrative is common in right-leaning circles [43], where much anti-climate rhetoric finds resonance [44]. ...
This research investigates the sociolinguistic patterns characterizing the polarized climate change debate on Facebook, focusing on the communication dynamics occurring within pro-climate action and anti-climate action stakeholders. Our study specifically aims to (1) identify the variations in language codes among these groups, and (2) assess how these linguistic nuances affect the respective audiences. For this goal, we compiled a comprehensive list of relevant English-speaking stakehold-ers in the climate debate and collected over 2000 of their posts spanning several months. To analyse the textual content they produced, we defined a series of quantitative language code indicators, measuring the readability, concreteness, subjectivity and scientificity of the language used, alongside topic modeling to dissect the discussion themes. Furthermore , we applied regression modeling to assess the impact of language code variations on the audience responses of the two debate groups. The results revealed significant variations in audience reactions across the debate spectrum, with the pro-climate audience responding more to variations in language style, whereas the anti-climate audience exhibited a distinct response to shifts in topic focus.
... Another ideology that has been associated with the rejection of science as a whole is populism, which pits ordinary citizens against a corrupt elite (Mudde, 2007). In recent years, many right-wing populist parties made climate skepticism into a core pillar of their ideology, albeit in different ways and to varying degrees (Fraune and Knodt, 2018;Gardiner, 2019;Lockwood, 2018;Schwörer and Fernández-García, 2023). Lockwood (2018) theorized that right-wing populists see climate change mitigation as a liberal agenda that is pursued against the national interest by a cosmopolitan elite and, moreover, that the complexity of science may challenge their desire for simple political solutions based on "the will of the people." ...
... In recent years, many right-wing populist parties made climate skepticism into a core pillar of their ideology, albeit in different ways and to varying degrees (Fraune and Knodt, 2018;Gardiner, 2019;Lockwood, 2018;Schwörer and Fernández-García, 2023). Lockwood (2018) theorized that right-wing populists see climate change mitigation as a liberal agenda that is pursued against the national interest by a cosmopolitan elite and, moreover, that the complexity of science may challenge their desire for simple political solutions based on "the will of the people." Mede and Schäfer (2020) related political populism to "science-related populism," which they conceptualized as the idea that ordinary people have a virtuous "common sense" and should therefore take the sovereignty over science and truth away from an unvirtuous academic elite. ...
Citizens’ trust in science increasingly depends on their political leaning. Structural equation models on survey data from 10 European countries (N = 5,306) demonstrate that this science polarization can be captured by a model with four levels of generalization. Voters of populist parties distrust the system and elite in general, which indirectly fuels a broad science skepticism. At another level, right-wingers have less trust in science as a whole than left-wingers. After accounting for this general skepticism, left-wingers and right-wingers are, however, similarly prone to contest ideology-incongruent research fields and specific claims. These findings have three implications. First, research on science skepticism should carefully consider all four levels and their interplay. Second, the science polarization between populist and non-populist voters has fundamentally different origins than the effect of left-right ideology. Third, a four-level model can expose ideological symmetries in science rejection that have previously remained largely undetected in observational studies.
... This is also often the result of Eurosceptic attitudes that induce a "reluctance to 'sacrifice' national sovereignty for the benefit of international agreements and cross-country collaboration" (Gottenhuber and Mulholland 2019, 12). Sovereigntist and securitarian orientations help explain the adoption of more ambivalent stances by some of these parties (Huber et al. 2021;Lockwood 2018) in which climate scepticism is not necessarily accompanied by an outright rejection of renewable energy. ...
... They often criticise the neoliberal and market-oriented logic of the mainstream discourse on environmental transition as shown in its 'techno-managerial framing of the process' (Bouzarovski 2022(Bouzarovski , 1004 and its concern with the interests of large corporations rather than social issues and energy democracy (Riexinger et al. 2021). Proposed solutions include the strengthening of international cooperation, citizen participation (Lockwood 2018;Huber et al. 2021) and redistributive policies that compensate social groups who are the most vulnerable in transition processes. ...
The climate crisis is a stress factor for democracies and a relevant issue within inter-party conflict. Besides environmental aspects, it involves the economic and national security dimensions of energy policy, as well as a wide range of social and political consequences of policy choices. This article analyses the framing of the energy transition by political parties, i.e., how they define the problem, propose and legitimise solutions, and identify and qualify the actors involved. Parties are central to the institutional system and the formation of the policy agenda, competing in the construction and transmission of frames while shaping conflict and policy solutions. The research questions of this article regard the articulation of frames along the left-right axis and the impact of the crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine. This work draws on the literature on energy policies and the framing of climate change and energy transition in order to first outline three main multidimensional frames: sustainability, eco-modernist and eco-nationalist. The empirical research consists in a qualitative analysis of Italian political party manifestos in the 2018 and 2022 (national) and 2019 (European) elections. Results confirm that parties frame the energy transition on the basis of their underlying ideology. External shocks, such as the Ukrainian crisis, lead to a rearticulation of frames, but the left-right alignment still holds as politicisation is reinforced.
... Most of the literature has focused on (ethnic) nationalism as the defining characteristic of far-right environmental politics. Scholarship on the far right's skepticism towards climate change (policies), for example, highlights how the far right typically opposes supranational climate policies, citing national sovereignty and identity as primary concerns (Lockwood 2018). Moreover, when the far right positions itself as a defender of the natural environment and biodiversity, both older (e.g. ...
... This populism is especially evident in the PRR's resistance to certain environmental policies. The best-known example is the scholarship on the PRR's climate skepticism, showing that this skepticism is partly rooted in a populist aversion to the elitism of climate science (Lockwood 2018). Additionally, populism emerges as a key component in understanding the PRR's stances on other environmental issues, with the PRR presenting itself as the voice of ordinary people against, for example, ambitious energy policies (Huber et al. 2021) and measures to reduce car traffic (Domann 2023). ...
Despite increased attention to the far right and environmental issues, little research has focused on the increasingly prominent attempts by populist radical right (PRR) parties to capitalize on farmers’ protests against climate and biodiversity policies across Europe. This article addresses this gap by analyzing PRR discourse through a case study of the Flemish PRR party, Vlaams Belang (VB), a party that has only recently started to present itself as the defender of farmers and rural populations. A discourse-theoretical analysis of VB’s 2019–2024 publications on farmers and agriculture reveals that VB employs the ‘the rural’ as a symbolic signifier to integrate farmers and their demands into its discourse. The party constructs farmers as the symbol of ‘the people’ through both nationalism and populism. Through their link with ‘the rural,’ farmers are positioned as rooted in ‘the nation’ within VB’s nationalist politics and as part of ‘the underdog’ in its populist politics.
... Thus, these categorisations do not seem to be universal and underlying ideologies may be more important for policy support (Hornsey et al., 2018). Speculatively, the stronger associations of some ideological factors with policy support in Global Northern countries may be the result of an increasingly polarised political discourse that seems particularly present within the realm of climate change in such countries and the rise of far-right political parties and opinions, particularly in the USA and Germany (Lockwood, 2018). ...
Our understanding of public support for climate policies predominantly stems from studies in the Global North and a focus on isolated policy types. Here, we examine how public support for four different climate policy types and the effect of ideological explanatory variables on such support vary among countries of the Global North and Global South. We surveyed representative samples of each three Global Northern countries (Germany, UK, USA) and Global Southern countries (Brazil, China and South Africa) – among those the highest emitters on their respective continents, contributing to 49.3 % of global carbon emissions – resulting in a total sample of N = 11,964 individuals. While we found significant variations among countries, our results showed that public support across all policy types was stronger in the three Global Southern countries, compared to that of the three Global Northern countries. We also found that a positive association of trust in public institutions and a negative association of individualistic worldviews with policy support were stronger in Global Northern countries, compared to Global Southern countries, regardless of policy type. These findings suggest that ideologies play a more important role for policy support in the Global Northern countries, compared to the Global Southern countries.
... This association often roots itself in an ideological standpoint, emphasizing the conflict between 'the people' and a perceived elite. Such an ideologically driven explanation suggests that the antagonism within right-wing populism plays a pivotal role in obstructing support for effective climate policies (Lockwood, 2018). This explanation complements the material drivers in left-behind places, mainly centered around heightened vulnerability to industrial restructuring and conversion, induced by climate policies. ...
This chapter examines policy and politics in Europe’s left-behind regions, characterized by the presence of heavy industry, in order to trace their role in democratic participation. I explore how these regions’ environmental challenges hinder the shift toward low-carbon initiatives and propose strategies to overcome these hurdles. Our research illustrates a significant link between environmental and social inequality, often described as environmental injustice, backed by empirical data. Energy-intensive and polluting industries, like energy, minerals, metals, and chemicals have led to socioeconomic deprivation in certain European areas over time. This perpetuates the creation of marginalised zones within capitalist centers, isolating both places and people. Our findings reveal that pollution and economic disparity are intertwined, perpetuating spatial inequality across time. These factors, when combined, reinforce each other, forming a crucial aspect of ongoing spatial inequality. Focusing on these ‘left-behind places’ perpetuates inequality, trapping regions in a cycle of industrial-technological dependence without sufficient support for transitioning. These disadvantaged regions commonly bear the burden of polluting industries, sacrificed for national economic growth, despite the health implications for their residents, often in exchange for promised employment opportunities.
... Given that climate change communication often refers to fact-based claims and expertise to signal credibility and objectivity, it is relevant to explore how such discourse may be undermined through populist blame attributions. Hence, literature has shown that climate change communication is often surrounded by populist claims that attack expert knowledge and consensus, and disinformation that attributes blame to elitist experts for allegedly misrepresenting reality (e.g., Lockwood, 2018;Nordensvard and Ketola, 2021). Thus, climate change may offer a different discursive opportunity for the delegitimization of media and political elites, and could be seen as a relevant contrast to anti-immigration communication. ...
In times of increasing distrust toward factual and established information, populism often takes on an explicit epistemic dimension. Prior research has indicated that disinformation labels employed in populist communication can fuel distrust in established media. Yet, we know little about whether the populist attribution of blame to different elites – politicians and the media – affect perceptions of factual relativism. To advance the field, we use an experiment ( N = 428) in which participants were exposed to populist messages blaming political or media elites for deceiving or not representing the people. Our main findings indicate that there are no direct effects of such accusations on perceived factual relativism. Yet, participants with higher levels of media distrust were affected most by populist messages in which mainstream media sources were blamed. As a main implication, this reveals that disinformation accusations in populist communication mainly have a reinforcing effect among distrusting citizens.
... While infrastructure investment constitutes a signi cant portion of shift measures, particularly in the transport sector, our ndings also show that both improve and shift measures heavily rely on economic instruments (Fig. 3). Worryingly in light of growing concerns over popular backlash to climate policy [45][46][47] , however, the composition of these measures suggests that they tend to make emission intensive practices (e.g., driving fuel-ine cient cars) more expensive, but access to subsidy schemes promoting the adoption of low-carbon alternatives (e.g., electric vehicles, renewable energy heating systems in privately owned homes) has tended to be biased towards high-income households that can afford such investments 48 . While this may be less problematic in urban areas with existing infrastructure that facilitate modal shifts, as evidenced here by Vienna, it is speci cally concerning with respect to lowincome households in rural areas, who face rising costs but lack enabling conditions for modal shifts. ...
Demand-side options are increasingly recognized for their potential to mitigate climate change while reducing reliance on novel carbon dioxide removal. However, systematic analyses of implemented demand-side mitigation policy mixes remain scarce, compromising assessment and exploration of effective and feasible demand-side policies. Here, we provide a multilevel analysis of the evolution, composition, and foci of demand-side mitigation policy mixes in the transport and housing sector from 1995 to 2024, focusing on the EU, the federal Austrian and two provincial levels (Vienna, Lower Austria). Our high-resolution policy database features 351 demand-side measures, systematically classified according to policy target, instrument type, and the avoid-shift-improve framework. We find that existing policy mixes heavily rely on shift and improve measures, critically neglecting mitigation potentials of avoid options as well as certain policy areas. This suggests an urgent need to broaden demand-side policy mixes and explore strategies that increase the political feasibility of avoid options.
... and Jolliff Scott 2019). Specific to climate policy, with the growing political salience of the climate issue, far-right populist parties have started taking an anti-internationalist opposition toward international climate governance (Lockwood 2018;Schwörer and Fernández-García 2024). At the extreme, these sentiments devolve into conspiracy theories about international elites trying to exert global control (Castanho Silva, Vegetti and Littvay 2017) -such as the example in Table 3 about George Soros and the United Nations. ...
Affective polarization and its accompanying cleavage-based sorting drives incivility and contentiousness around climate change and other science-related issues. Looking at the COVID-19 period, we study cross-domain spillover of incivility and contentiousness in public engagements with climate change and climate science on Twitter and Reddit. We find strong evidence of the signatures of affective polarization surrounding COVID-19 spilling into the climate change domain. Across different social media systems, COVID-19 content is associated with incivility and contentiousness in climate discussions. These patterns of increased antagonism were responsive to pandemic events that made the link between science and public policy more salient. We also show that the observed spillover activated along pre-pandemic political cleavages, specifically anti-internationalist populist beliefs, that linked climate policy opposition to vaccine hesitancy. Our findings highlight the dangers of entrenched cross-domain polarization manifesting as spillover of antagonistic behavior.
... In the aftermath of the euro crisis and the so-called 'refugee crisis', the increasing importance of political integration and immigration has been successfully mobilised by parties of the populist radical right (the traditional/authoritarian/ nationalist pole) on the one hand, and Green parties (the Green/alternative/libertarian pole) on the other (Hooghe and Marks, 2018: 111). Furthermore, Lockwood (2018) argues that attitudes towards climate change and climate policy, which are also becoming more salient as the climate crisis worsens, are structured by the same ideological basis of liberal versus authoritarian (Lockwood, 2018: 12). Societal conflicts around these topics are seen as drivers of RWP voting both because RWP parties voice positions against transnationalisation and because they portray themselves as the only opposition against the 'liberal elites' who are seen as responsible for these developments. ...
With the emergence of the two newest party families, Green and right-wing populist (RWP) parties, the assumption rose that these parties can be considered the two poles of the new transnational cleavage. In this paper, I analyse the impact of voter attitudes toward liberal values, immigration, EU integration and climate change in nine Western and Northern European countries on voting for Green and RWP parties using data from the ESS10 (2020–2022). Using descriptive analyses and logistic regression models, I find some evidence of a transnational cleavage, in the form of an ideological as well as structural divide between Green and RWP parties and their voters. However, this divide does not extend across all four attitudes or all nine countries. I conclude that Green and RWP parties do not seem to be complete opposites in Northern and Western Europe, but only in country- and issue-specific contexts.
... This study also provides insights into the potential impact of nationalism and populism on global collaboration over climate change. Right-wing populism, much of which is based on nationalist narratives, has been increasingly harmful to global collaboration on important issues such as climate change and environmental protection (Lockwood 2018 become an important crisis. The public may not perceive it to be as costly as some other unpopular policies and thus may be more likely to be affected by propaganda on this issue. ...
China's ambitious plan for reducing carbon emissions may have a significant impact on its economy and impose an increased cost burden on the public. Conventionally, governments endure political costs when implementing unpopular policies. How can China achieve its goal without causing political risks? In this paper, we argue that China can promote its costly carbon policy through nationalist propaganda that points to international competition. Using an online survey experiment and an ethnographic study, we find that although nationalist propaganda does not increase public support for the policy, it successfully mitigates the political costs by increasing the respondents' political trust and motivating them to defend the government against criticism. Furthermore, such nationalist narratives do not reduce public support for international cooperation. This study provides insights into how China solicits support for its ambitious yet costly environmental policies. More broadly, this study reveals how autocrats can use propaganda to promote costly policies. Acknowledgment We thank helpful comments from Kwan Nok Chan, Jiangnan Zhu, Haifeng Huang, and the participants and audience in the panel of EPSA 2023 and APSA 2023. We are grateful of Richard Walker and Liang Dong from the Centre for Public Affairs and Law for providing funding support. We thank the Professional English language editing support provided by AsiaEdit. All errors are our own.
... For instance, Bjork-James (2023) found that the apocalyptic view among United States evangelicals often led to diminished interest in environmental issues. Lockwood (2018) noted that Republican Evangelical Protestants were more skeptical about climate change compared to their Democratic counterparts. Considering these observations, our research raises two critical questions: Does the spiritual orientation of SME senior managers or owners affect the degree to which their organization adopts a strategic green orientation? ...
Due to their significant environmental impact, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are critical in improving a green economy. This research examines the influence of firm environmental ethics, spiritual orientation, and stakeholder pressure on the green orientation of SME senior management. Utilizing a sample of CEOs and owner-managers from 489 Chinese SMEs, data accumulated from October 2023 to March 2024 were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The outcomes confirm the significant impact of firm environmental ethics, spiritual orientation, and stakeholder pressure on senior management’s green orientation, which, in turn, improves SME outcomes. In addition, senior management’s green orientation partially intermediates the influence of firm environmental ethics, spiritual orientation, and stakeholder pressure on SME outcomes. Stakeholder pressure further moderates the link between the senior management’s green orientation and SME outcomes, indicating the importance of external pressures in adopting strategic green orientations. These results support the resource-based view, stakeholder theory, and upper-echelon theory, offering practical guidance for businesses seeking to incorporate green strategies into their fundamental operations.
... Vested interests and ideological forces that promote business as usual are critical factors (Stoddard et al., 2021). The rise of populism and nationalism (Lockwood, 2018;Marquardt and Lederer, 2022), local resistance, and voter apathy challenge climate policy ambitions rolling back of climate legislation. Other common hurdles are short-termism, which is a key feature of all political systems, not least in liberal democracies when politicians need to secure reelection and citizens prioritize near-term benefits such as jobs and security rather than long-term public goods, such as curbing climate change. ...
This book examines how, and under what conditions, states – in collaboration with non-state actors – can govern a societal transformation toward large-scale decarbonization in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement. It advances an innovative analytical framework on how the state governs through collaborative climate governance to foster cooperation, deliberation, and consensus between state and non-state actors. The book focuses on Sweden, which aims to become a fossil-free state. The chapters analyze Sweden's progress toward net-zero emissions, its role in international climate governance, and how the COVID-19 pandemic affected climate networks. Providing valuable policy insights for other countries endeavoring to decarbonize, this book is a useful reference for graduate students and researchers in climate governance, political science, and international relations. It is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
While most Spanish citizens recognize the urgency of climate change, opinions differ on the specific measures to mitigate it, which are grouped under the concept of ecological transition. The ecological transition policies put forward by states, parties, and political leaders have become a factor of political polarization, with the media—through their role as shapers of public discourse—playing a significant part. In this article, we examine the ecological transition from two perspectives. First, we explore the level of political polarization among Spanish society regarding how ecological transition is framed and how ecological transition measures are perceived. Second, we investigate how the media cover these measures and views to identify potential connections between their portrayal of the issue and the public’s perceptions. A two-pronged methodological approach is applied: a survey to assess citizens’ perceptions and a content analysis of four Spanish newspapers with diverse editorial leanings to evaluate the media treatment of the topic. Results show that left-wing respondents agree more with the idea that ecological transition is the solution to climate change, whereas right-wing respondents more frequently view it as a threat to current lifestyles and as a process imposed by governments. These results are also reflected in the press coverage of ecological transition. We conclude that the press emerges as an actor that reinforces the existing political polarization in society around ecological transition.
The effectiveness of public environmental
policies requires not only the development of effective
instruments but also depends on the acceptability of these
policies by the targeted public. However, acceptability can
lead to paradoxes and social dilemmas. Despite a growing
global awareness of issues related to climate change, this
awareness does not necessarily translate into support for
environmental policies. Economic literature has observed
that, although there is broad consensus on the benefits of
environmental policies, specific initiatives often encounter
resistance or receive minimal support during their
implementation. This thesis aims to examine the
determinants of the acceptability of environmental policies.
It is structured into three chapters focused on
empirical methods to analyze the main factors that
may influence the acceptability of environmental
policies. The first chapter presents an empirical
analysis that examines the determinants of
environmental concerns, revisiting Maslow's
hierarchy of needs model. The second chapter
proposes two explanations for support of
environmental issues, based on household budget
constraints and the indirect effects of mistrust and
ignorance. The final chapter investigates in detail
how individual political orientations and the
different political regimes of countries (whether
liberal or interventionist) influence environmental
concerns.
This article reviews recent insights from the blooming Comparative Political Economy (CPE) literature on climate change with the aim to demonstrate the importance of integrating climate change into the field of CPE and to highlight the contributions of CPE to our understanding of the social and political obstacles to effective climate policies. In addition, we advance two key points to bring the CPE literature forward. To tighten the dialogue between the “electoral politics” and “interest group politics” approaches, we propose understanding climate politics as a triadic conflict between losers of climate change, losers of public climate action (PCA), and winners of PCA. Second, we argue that the scope of CPE studies needs expansion. While existing CPE literature predominantly focuses on climate change mitigation, it is essential to consider climate change adaptation due to its significant distributive implications at the macro‐ and micro‐levels of societies.
When populism is seen as “the biggest obstacle to tackling climate change,” a depoliticized climate policy managed by elites—rooted in an antipopulist imaginary—can seem to be the most feasible response to the climate crisis. By locating the core problem within populism itself, however, this response elevates a failed mainstream approach. To move beyond this position, we draw insights from both an oft-neglected U.S. populist tradition and contemporary environmental politics scholarship to argue for an alternative approach to politicizing climate action. A “climate justice imaginary” as found, for example, in the growing global movement for a Feminist Green New Deal offers a promising way forward because it is rooted in everyday concerns, centers solidarity and care, and creates free space for an inclusive democratic process. We also show how it contrasts with the populist imaginary advanced by the proponents of post-political critique.
More than 50 years have passed since the eco-emancipatory project (EEP) was launched in the wake of the silent revolution triggered by new social movements. A response to the side-effects of first (industrial) modernity, the EEP helped to shape a second (reflexive) modernity that was supposed to democratise society and liberate nature. But the EEP seems to have failed on that account – hence the post-apocalyptic turn within environmentalism. However, the fate of the EEP is more nuanced than it seems. In this paper, I argue that the latter has been by and large successfully assimilated by liberal societies. The ecomodernist response to the Anthropocene, which pursues human and nonhuman emancipation by means others than those of the EEP, attests to that. It also signals a way out of late modernity, heralding a third modernity characterised by the post-utopian management of socionatural relations in increasingly liberal albeit not fully democratic societies.
Climate backlash and policy dismantling, that is, the reversal of existing decarbonisation policies, can be observed in an increasing number of countries. Typically, policy change tends to be slow, while climate backlash can unfold quite fast. How is such rapid political change made possible? Here, we investigate the case of Sweden, where a newly elected government significantly revised and changed existing climate policies. This change was forecast to increase carbon emissions rather than reduce them and included the abolishment of existing policies. While this process, in hindsight, could thus be seen as policy dismantling, it was characterised by a highly ambiguous debate that portrayed the new climate political approach as superior and much more effective than previous governments' approaches, and there was little, if any, opposition to these changes. To understand how such radical political change was possible, we examine policy documents and political debates and identify the discursive mechanisms employed in its legitimation. Our findings suggest that the parties in government used a set of discursive mechanisms to speak to different climate political discourses—welfarism, liberalism and nationalism—simultaneously. This created an effect that we call discursive flipping, which is qualitatively different from discursive blending, and that appeased potential opposition from both the left and right. As part of this, the creation of epistemic confusion seemed particularly effective in disarming opposition. We argue that discursive mechanisms are useful conceptual tools to examine the discursive legitimation of radical policy change, here realised by rendering discourses so ambiguous that opposition became discursively difficult to uphold.
Across diverse policy domains, there is broad concern about whether trust in science and expertise has eroded during the past decade. Using quota-based surveys with over 7,500 respondents across five countries and preregistered vignette experiments, we investigate what persuades populists and non-populists to accept expert advice. We find first that populism is associated with less willingness to accept expert advice, yet with variation between countries and topics. Second, we find both populists and non-populists are similarly impacted by stronger arguments. Finally, we show that populists are more likely to judge advice as poorly reasoned and perceive it as politically biased. A mediation analysis showed that the relationship between populism and advice acceptance was nearly completely mediated by these judgments. Our study indicates that populists not only listen to expertise but also respond to the same qualities of expert advice as others, even if their skepticism is higher.
Skepticism and resistance towards vaccines have been reported worldwide in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. During the restrictions on public gatherings, these attitudes were mostly voiced on social media, providing a vast digital record for examining their motivations. This paper systematizes the antivaccine arguments in Chilean Twitter (now called X) interactions over six months in 2021, in which the country achieved its highest COVID-19 vaccination rates, analyzing 72,441 tweets from 20,293 different accounts. We connect these arguments to recent work in political theory that categorizes the populist criticism of science into three types of objections: a moral, a democratic, and an epistemic objection. We find that all three are clearly identifiable in the data, in somewhat similar proportion: some denounced the vaccination scheme as a conspiracy led by selfish global elites (moral); others complained that the authorities, following scientific advice but with no democratic warrant, were taking away their freedoms (democratic); and yet others pointed to a broad distrust of the scientific procedure in which the vaccine was developed, trusting instead their personal opinions and anecdotal evidence (epistemic). We also characterize the posting and interaction rates of the accounts that use these objections, and whether they switch between them.
This paper focuses on climate coalitions and commitments in the Global South by comparing the cases of two Latin American countries, Chile and Mexico. Chile, once a laggard, emerged as a regional leader in climate policy in the early 2020s, while Mexico, a pioneer until the early 2010s, experienced a backlash and retreated. How can we make sense of these diverging trajectories? How and why do climate commitments emerge? This paper argues that robust commitments are only possible when driven by a bundled narrative that facilitates the formation of a broad coalition. Such a coalition, in turn, crafts and advances the climate narrative, as demonstrated by the Chilean case. By exploring the interplay between climate narrative creation and coalition‐building, the paper underscores climate coalitions' fragile and often precarious nature in the Global South. It seeks to contribute to the existing knowledge on climate policy and the formation of climate coalitions, particularly in the Global South, where climate policy challenges are often more intensified than in the Global North.
This article examines support for environmental policies and provides new evidence on the role of social class and the rural–urban divide. We analyze how occupational structure, either through the economic costs individuals may incur when such policies are implemented or through value preferences shaped by the workplace, influence support for these policies. Drawing on data from Round 8 of the European Social Survey (ESS8) and 2 alternative class-structure classifications, our findings reveal 3 key insights. First, on the vertical dimension, we find that costlier measures face stronger resistance from lower socioeconomic groups. Second, on the horizontal dimension, sociocultural professionals emerge as the social class most supportive of environmental policies, while manual workers are the most reluctant to accept them. Finally, our results indicate that the interaction between social structure and the territorial dimension is weak. Overall, this study enhances our understanding of the social cleavages that may influence the ecological transition.
Political parties often mobilise issues that can improve their electoral fortunes by splitting existing coalitions. We argue that by adopting a distinctively adversarial stance, radical right-wing parties have increasingly politicised climate change policies as a wedge issue. This strategy challenges the mainstream party consensus and seeks to mobilise voter concerns over green initiatives. Relying on state-of-the-art multilingual large language models, we empirically examine nearly half a million press releases from 76 political parties across nine European democracies to support this argument. Our findings demonstrate that the radical right’s oppositional climate policy rhetoric diverges significantly from the mainstream consensus. Survey data further reveal climate policy scepticism among voters across the political spectrum, highlighting the mobilising potential of climate policies as a wedge issue. This research advances our understanding of issue competition and the politicisation of climate change.
Energy transition policies often have distributional effects that could have electoral consequences. I study this issue in the context of a Dutch policy change that increased taxes on household natural gas consumption and redistributed the revenues as subsidies for renewables. Radical right parties were the only source of political opposition. A Differences-in-Differences (DiD) analysis with panel data from 2007-2020 shows that after the policy change renters with individualized utility bills became 5–6 percentage points more likely to vote for the radical right compared to renters with utilities included in their rents. Renters with individualized utility bills also became relatively less sympathetic towards the Green party and more concerned about price increases but they did not alter their left-right self-placements nor their views on immigration or the European Union. A secondary analysis finds similar effects for individuals (including home-owners) who are energy poor. This suggests an emerging economically rooted political cleavage over energy transition policies.
The production and dissemination of disinformation is a global phenomenon in relation to sensitive issues such as climate change. This article analyses the activity (n = 419) of nine independent platforms debunking disinformation in North America, Europe and Latin America. Findings show that most fact-checking results were false or misleading (86.4%). Four main conclusions are drawn. Firstly, regardless of language, geographical or cultural differences, there is a consistent presence of manipulated content across countries, confirming the worrying levels of disinformation on climate change. Secondly, three central narratives for spreading disinformation have been identified: denial of scientific evidence, distortion of science and attribution of ulterior motives to action on climate change, often linked to conspiracy theories. Although there are differences in terms of representation, these narratives are prevalent in the three regions. Thirdly, these narratives revolve around topics such as meteorology, natural phenomena and temperature or the distortion of evidence about the effects of climate change. Finally, social media (52.5%) and websites and pseudo-media (25.8%) are the main sources of climate change disinformation.
This book examines how, and under what conditions, states – in collaboration with non-state actors – can govern a societal transformation toward large-scale decarbonization in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement. It advances an innovative analytical framework on how the state governs through collaborative climate governance to foster cooperation, deliberation, and consensus between state and non-state actors. The book focuses on Sweden, which aims to become a fossil-free state. The chapters analyze Sweden's progress toward net-zero emissions, its role in international climate governance, and how the COVID-19 pandemic affected climate networks. Providing valuable policy insights for other countries endeavoring to decarbonize, this book is a useful reference for graduate students and researchers in climate governance, political science, and international relations. It is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Issue frames portraying climate science as uncertain are cited as a key impediment to new climate change and energy policies. However, some have recently argued that the debate over policy impacts, especially policy impacts on consumers, has become more politically salient than the debate over science. This study applies qualitative content analysis to 340 documents from the conservative think tank, the Heartland Institute, to test whether certain policy frames have become more common among leading opponents of climate policy in the United States. The results indicate a continued reliance on science framing, with more directed attacks on climate scientists and fewer frames stressing the uncertainty of climate science. An increase in the use of policy frames related to effects on consumers also suggests that opposition to climate policy is taking new forms as the political debate evolves, with ramifications for climate change policy opposition on an international scale.
Mitigating climate change requires countries to provide a global public good. This means that the domestic cleavages underlying mass attitudes toward international climate policy are a central determinant of its provision. We argue that the industry-specific costs of emission abatement and internalized social norms help explain support for climate policy. To evaluate our predictions we develop novel measures of industry-specific interests by cross-referencing individuals’ sectors of employment and objective industry-level pollution data and employing quasi-behavioral measures of social norms in combination with both correlational and conjoint-experimental data. We find that individuals working in pollutive industries are 7 percentage points less likely to support climate co-operation than individuals employed in cleaner sectors. Our results also suggest that reciprocal and altruistic individuals are about 10 percentage points more supportive of global climate policy. These findings indicate that both interests and norms function as complementary explanations that improve our understanding of individual policy preferences.
Poland’s energy mix is dominated by indigenous coal, and since the country joined the European Union in 2004 it has been clear that it will do much to safeguard its domestic coal sector and resist pressures for ambitious harmonized decarbonization efforts. At the same time, Poland is meeting its renewable energy targets and its onshore wind capacity is growing at a significant pace. In 2015 and 2016, a new renewable energy policy mix has been put in place, relying on tenders for renewable energy volume in large scale RES and a micro-installations support scheme. In parallel, a capacity mechanism is still on the table, though its details are only being worked out. What explains this particular choice of instruments? In this article I focus on four explanatory factors: the influence of the European environment; domestic political and organizational fields and the material and structural constraints of the energy system and resource endowment. I provide a historical overview of renewable energy policy in Poland since the early 1990s, showing how policy evolved, new actors and coalitions emerged, and how the influence of the EU changed overtime. The preliminary findings suggest that the European environment has been crucial in pushing for stronger RES support policies, while the inherently instable domestic political field explains the soap opera of renewable energy policy legislation: drafts, new plans, amendments and legal instability. On the other hand, the choice of particular instruments, within the confines of options acceptable by the EU, is best explained by the stable and segmented organizational field, dominated by a professional logic of the centralized, engineer-lead coal sector, which in turn is linked to the importance of the country’s resource endowment. In these conditions, the current renewable energy policy mix seems optimal for the actors dominating the organizational field, and a deep paradigm shift and overturning the political economy of the energy sector would be needed to change that.
Poland’s energy mix is dominated by indigenous coal, and since the country joined the European Union in 2004 it has been clear that it will do much to safeguard its domestic coal sector and resist pressures for ambitious harmonized decarbonization efforts. At the same time, Poland is meeting its renewable energy targets and its onshore wind capacity is growing at a significant pace. In 2015 and 2016, a new renewable energy policy mix has been put in place, relying on tenders for renewable energy volume in large scale RES and a micro-installations support scheme. In parallel, a capacity mechanism is still on the table, though its details are only being worked out. What explains this particular choice of instruments? In this article I focus on four explanatory factors: the influence of the European environment; domestic political and organizational fields and the material and structural constraints of the energy system and resource endowment. I provide a historical overview of renewable energy policy in Poland since the early 1990s, showing how policy evolved, new actors and coalitions emerged, and how the influence of the EU changed overtime. The preliminary findings suggest that the European environment has been crucial in pushing for stronger RES support policies, while the inherently instable domestic political field explains the soap opera of renewable energy policy legislation: drafts, new plans, amendments and legal instability. On the other hand, the choice of particular instruments, within the confines of options acceptable by the EU, is best explained by the stable and segmented organizational field, dominated by a professional logic of the centralized, engineer-lead coal sector, which in turn is linked to the importance of the country’s resource endowment. In these conditions, the current renewable energy policy mix seems optimal for the actors dominating the organizational field, and a deep paradigm shift and overturning the political economy of the energy sector would be needed to change that.
Is orchestration democratically legitimate? On one hand, debates concerning the legitimacy and democratic deficits of international politics continue unabated. On the other, the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has progressively engaged in processes of orchestration culminating in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Scholarship on orchestration has almost exclusively focused on how to ensure effectiveness while excluding normative questions. This lacuna is addressed by arguing that orchestration should be assessed according to its democratic credentials. The promises and pitfalls of orchestration can be usefully analyzed by applying a set of democratic values: participation, deliberation, accountability, and transparency. Two major orchestration efforts by the UNFCCC both pre-and post-Paris are shown to have substantive democratic shortfalls, not least with regard to participation and accountability. Ways of strengthening the democratic legitimacy of orchestration are identified.
We know that the costs of implementing various climate change mitigation policies are not uniformly distributed across individuals in society, but we do not know to what extent this unequal cost distribution influences public support for these various policies. This study shows that cost distribution is an important explanation for variations in public support for various climate policies. Using individual-level data on industry of employment and support for a range of climate policies, we find that those employed in the fossil fuel industry are less likely to support climate policies that are particularly costly to their industry, but are as likely as everybody else to support policies with lower costs to the industry. This finding challenges the traditional bifurcation between climate change "skeptics" and "acceptors." Furthermore, we find that opposition to renewable energy by large fossil fuel producers and consumers, identified in the political economy literature, is not uniformly found among these companies’ employees. The most important implication of this study for policy makers is that support for climate policies is sensitive to the compensation of exposed groups and stimulation of alternative avenues for employment.
China’s emergence as a great economic power has brought an epochal shift in patterns of world trade. This shift has toppled much of the received empirical wisdom about how labor markets adjust to trade shocks. Alongside its heralded consumer benefits, trade has both significant distributional costs, which theory has long recognized, and substantial adjustment costs, which the literature has tended to downplay. These adjustment costs mean that trade impacts are most visible not in national-level outcomes for broad skill types, as canonical theory would suggest, but in the local labor markets in which the industries most exposed to foreign competition are concentrated. Adjustment in local labor markets is remarkably slow, with wages and local laborforce participation rates remaining depressed, local unemployment rates remaining elevated, and public transfer benefits take-up rising across a spectrum of programs for at least a full decade after trade shocks commence. Within impacted localities, the workers who are most affected by rising trade exposure are those initially employed in firms that compete most directly with China. These workers, and in particular those in lower earnings deciles, experience greater job churning and reduced lifetime income. Recent literature also addresses the aggregation of local-level impacts of trade shocks into national-level outcomes. Employment has fallen in U.S. industries more exposed to import competition, as expected. So too has overall employment in the local labor markets in which these industries were concentrated. Offsetting employment gains in non-tradables, export-oriented tradables, or imported-input-using industries have yet to materialize. Better understanding when and where trade is costly, and how and why it may be beneficial, are key items on the research agenda for trade and labor economists.
Research on the extent and sources of international differences in climate change awareness and perception among general publics could improve understanding of the opportunities and challenges of formulating politically feasible and effective international climate policies. However, few studies have attempted to explain cross-national variation in climate change public opinion. This study builds on the relatively small body of existing research on this topic by investigating several cross-national predictors of public awareness and perception of climate change with ordinary least squares (OLS) and robust regression models using national-level data from the 2007–2008 and 2010 Gallup World Polls, which provide the largest available international datasets on climate change public opinion. The following results were most consistent across the surveys and models: 1) awareness of climate change is greater in countries that are wealthier and more highly educated, and is not influenced by political orientation or vulnerability; 2) perceived risk is greater in countries that are wealthier, left-leaning, and more vulnerable to climate change, and not affected by unemployment; 3) perceived human cause is greater in countries that are wealthier, left-leaning, more vulnerable, and more highly educated. The effects of education on perceived risk and unemployment rate on awareness and perceived human cause were not consistent.
Even as the consensus over the reality and significance of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) becomes stronger within the scientific community, this global environmental problem is increasingly contested in the political arena and wider society. The spread of debate and contention over ACC from the scientific to socio-political realms has been detrimental to climate science. This article provides an overview of organized climate change denial. Focusing primarily on the US, where denial first took root and remains most active, this article begins by describing the growth of conservative-based opposition to environmentalism and environmental science in general. It then explains why climate change became the central focus of this opposition, which quickly evolved into a coordinated and well-funded machine or 'industry'. It also examines denialists' rationale for attacking the scientific underpinnings of climate change policy and the crucial strategy of 'manufacturing uncertainty' they employ.
There is a strong political divide on climate change in the US general public, with Liberals and Democrats expressing greater belief in and concern about climate change than Conservatives and Republicans. Recent studies find a similar though less pronounced divide in other countries. Its leadership in international climate policy making warrants extending this line of research to the European Union (EU). The extent of a left–right ideological divide on climate change views is examined via Eurobarometer survey data on the publics of 25 EU countries before the 2008 global financial crisis, the 2009 ‘climategate’ controversy and COP-15 in Copenhagen, and an increase in organized climate change denial campaigns. Citizens on the left consistently reported stronger belief in climate change and support for action to mitigate it than did citizens on the right in 14 Western European countries. There was no such ideological divide in 11 former Communist countries, likely due to the low political salience of climate change and the differing meaning of left–right identification in these countries.
Observers of social change have been fascinated for a long time by the question of how the employment structure evolves: toward good jobs, bad jobs, or increasing polarization? Three issues are at stake. At the microlevel of single jobs, the concern is with the quality of new employment created. The question raised is to know whether jobs are becoming better paid, more highly skilled, and endowed with greater autonomy. At the macrolevel of social structure, the debate evolves around the question whether occupational change transforms affluent countries into large middle-class societies or, on the contrary, into increasingly divided class societies. The two levels of analysis are bridged by the concern for social mobility. Here, the question is as to whether change in the employment structure allows forthcoming generations to move to more rewarding jobs than those held by their parents – or whether downward mobility is the more likely outcome. The direction of change has then manifest implications for parties’ electoral constituencies and citizens’ political preferences. This chapter strives to shed light on some of these issues by analyzing the pattern of occupational change in Western Europe since 1990. It does so by examining the evolution of the employment structure with large-scale microlevel data for Britain, Denmark, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland. The central question is to know what kind of occupations have been expanding and declining over the last two decades: high-paid jobs, low-paid jobs, or both? Our analysis shows that the five countries under study underwent a process of major occupational upgrading. The only ambiguity concerns the question whether the process is clear-cut or has a polarizing twist to it. The labor market created ample opportunities at the high-skilled end of the occupational structure but made perspectives bleak in the lower-middle range of jobs held by clerks and production workers.
People's attitudes toward climate change differ, and these differences may correspond to distinct patterns of media use and information seeking. However, studies extending analyses of attitude types and their specific media diets to countries beyond the United States are lacking. We use a secondary analysis of survey data from Germany to identify attitudes toward climate change among the German public and specify those segments of the population based on their media use and information seeking. Similar to the Global Warming's Six Americas study, we find distinct attitudes (Global Warming's Five Germanys) that differ in climate change-related perceptions as well as in media use and communicative behavior. These findings can help tailor communication campaigns regarding climate change to specific audiences.
© The Author(s) 2015.
Research on US public concern about environmental issues finds ideology or political party are the most consistent background predictors. Party is commonly defined by three groups: Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. Here, using statewide New Hampshire survey data, we elaborate this approach to distinguish a fourth group: respondents who say they support the Tea Party movement. On 8 out of 12 science- or environment-related questions, Tea Party supporters differ significantly from non–Tea Party Republicans. Tea Party supporters are less likely than non–Tea Party Republicans to trust scientists for information about environmental issues, accept human evolution, believe either the physical reality or the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, or recognise trends in Arctic ice, glaciers, or CO2.
Despite factual gaps, Tea Party supporters express greater confidence in their own understanding of climate change. Independents, on the other hand, differ less from non–Tea Party Republicans on most of these questions—although Independents do more often accept the scientific consensus on climate change. On many science and environmental questions, Republicans and Tea Party supporters stand farther apart than Republicans and Independents.
Despite the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change and its implications, there is considerably less certainty or strength of belief among the general public in some industrialised countries. One explanation for the lack of consensus is the partisan nature of political debate about climate change. A survey of Australian politicians demonstrates that political party affiliation and ideology have a powerful influence on climate change beliefs. Politicians from Labor and Green parties (centre-left and progressive parties) exhibited beliefs that were more consistent with scientific consensus about climate change than non-aligned or conservative leaders. Moreover, political ideology (left–right) emerged as the most important predictor of politicians’ climate change beliefs. These findings highlight the role of political partisanship and ideology in undermining consensus around climate change and suggest the need to build consensus through constructing climate change messages that appeal to closely held values and which advance the discussion of solutions along non-partisan lines.
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To many, the transformation of West European party systems since the 1970s and 1980s was seen as evidence that the era of cleavage based politics was over. The rise of identity politics was interpreted not only as a result of the waning of the traditional class and religious cleavages, but as evidence for a new era in which political preferences de-coupled from social structure began to shape voting behavior. It was assumed that voters were “beginning to choose” parties for their policy propositions, the quality of their personnel, or based on their value preferences. The more recent successes of the extreme populist right once again were taken to indicate that anti-establishment populist mobilization was cutting across class alignments. From this point of view, the by now well-established finding that the working class is over-represented in the extreme populist right’s electorate came unexpected.
While a host of hypotheses have been advanced to explain the propensity of parts of the working class to support the extreme right, the phenomenon still awaits a theoretical explanation and a systematic empirical test of the rivaling theses. In this chapter, we review the explanations that have been put forward and test whether economic grievances or cultural world-views are better in explaining the phenomenon. Both are related to the processes of modernization and globalization, which have a cultural, as well as an economic component. We argue that the changing nature of conflicts in West European party systems is crucial in explaining the shift of the manual working class to the extreme right. In particular, the dual transformation of political space has resulted in a new cultural divide that plays a pivotal role in explaining the extreme populist right’s appeal for the working class. Preferences along this divide are structured by education and by the experiences individuals make at their workplace, either making them more open to cultural liberalism, or leading them to endorse a anti-universalistic counter-model of community that is based on the exclusion of immigrants.
In conceptual terms, we make an innovative contribution by focusing both on the individual-level characteristics accounting for participation in elections, as well as on those explaining the choice of extreme right-wing populist parties. Using Heckman selection models, we show that the losers of economic modernization actually abstain from voting, while those uncomfortable with cultural modernity support the extreme populist right. Even if we control for political preferences and a number of other factors, however, the over-representation of blue collar workers in the extreme right’s electorate persists. The working class by now appears firmly rooted in this segment of the electorate. While not being the social segment worst-off in post-industrial society, it has experienced a relative decline as compared to the postwar decades, making it receptive to the culturalist appeal of the extreme right.
These findings beg the question how individuals with similar political preferences vote in countries where extreme right-wing populist parties are absent. In a final step, we tackle this question. We show that not voting is the preferred option of anti-universalistic or authoritarian segments of the working class where an extreme right option is missing. Thus, the capacity of the mainstream parties to rally this electorate appears limited even in those party systems not facing an extreme right challenger.
The analysis is based on survey data from thirteen West European countries, six of which feature sizable extreme right-wing populist parties, while these parties failed to achieve an electoral breakthrough in seven others, the Greek LAOS and the Swedish Democrats having been on the verge of breaking through. We start with the discussion of the continued relevance of social class in West European politics and lay out our account of the formation of a new cultural divide. We then discuss various explanations that may account for the propensity of the working class to support the extreme right, and include measures for these hypotheses in our statistical models. The empirical part of this chapter is structured as follows. In a first step, we look at the class basis of the extreme populist right and analyze to which degree the propensity of certain occupational classes to support these parties is explained by education and preferences along the economic and cultural divides. We also take into account the factors explaining political participation. We then take a closer look at voting choices within the working class and try to discern the motives that push voters to vote for the extreme populist right, rather than other parties. Finally, we analyze the vote of those individuals within the working class that share the individual-level characteristics of those supporting populist right parties in the countries where these are present, but lack such an option in their own party system.
This book examines contemporary changes in labor market institutions in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, focusing on developments in industrial relations, vocational education and training, and labor market policy. It finds that there are in fact distinct varieties of liberalization associated with very different distributive outcomes. Most scholarship equates liberal capitalism with inequality and coordinated capitalism with higher levels of social solidarity. However, this study explains why the institutions of coordinated capitalism and egalitarian capitalism coincided and complemented one another in the 'Golden Era' of postwar development in the 1950s and 1960s, and why they no longer do so. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this study reveals that the successful defense of the institutions traditionally associated with coordinated capitalism has often been a recipe for increased inequality due to declining coverage and dualization. Conversely, it argues that some forms of labor market liberalization are perfectly compatible with continued high levels of social solidarity and indeed may be necessary to sustain it.
Populism may seem like it has come out of nowhere, but it has been on the rise for a while. I argue that economic history and economic theory both provide ample grounds for anticipating that advanced stages of economic globalization would produce a political backlash. While the backlash may have been predictable, the specific form it took was less so. I distinguish between left-wing and right-wing variants of populism, which differ with respect to the societal cleavages that populist politicians highlight. The first has been predominant in Latin America, and the second in Europe. I argue that these different reactions are related to the relative salience of different types of globalization shocks.
This book serves as a sequel to two distinguished volumes on capitalism: Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge, 1999) and Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1985). Both volumes took stock of major economic challenges advanced industrial democracies faced, as well as the ways political and economic elites dealt with them. However, during the last decades, the structural environment of advanced capitalist democracies has undergone profound changes: sweeping deindustrialization, tertiarization of the employment structure, and demographic developments. This book provides a synthetic view, allowing the reader to grasp the nature of these structural transformations and their consequences in terms of the politics of change, policy outputs, and outcomes. In contrast to functionalist and structuralist approaches, the book advocates and contributes to a 'return of electoral and coalitional politics' to political economy research.
European far-right parties have been making headway and could pose a risk to climate-friendly policy.
Social change and multicultural society in Western Europe against diversity - new right ideology in the new Europe individualism and xenophobia - radical right-wing populism in a comparative perspective the social basis of radical right-wing populism political conflict in the postmodern age.
The 2016 US presidential nominee Donald Trump has broken with the policies of previous Republican Party presidents on trade, immigration, and war, in favor of a more nationalist and populist platform. Using detailed Gallup survey data for a large number of American adults, I analyze the individual and geographic factors that predict a higher probability of viewing Trump favorably and contrast the results with those found for other candidates. The results show mixed evidence that economic distress has motivated Trump support. His supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations, but they earn relatively high household incomes, and living in areas more exposed to trade or immigration does not increase Trump support. On the other hand, living in zip-codes more reliant on social security income, or with high mortgage to income ratios, or less reliance on capital income, predicts Trump support. There is stronger evidence that racial isolation and less strictly economic measures of social status, namely health and intergenerational mobility, are robustly predictive of more favorable views toward Trump, and these factors predict support for him but not other Republican presidential candidates.
Nationally representative surveys conducted in 2008 and 2009 found significant declines in Americans’ climate change beliefs, risk perceptions, and trust in scientists. Several potential explanations for the declines are explored, including the poor state of the economy, a new administration and Congress, diminishing media attention, and abnormal weather. The analysis also specifically examines the impact of Climategate – an international scandal resulting from the unauthorized release of emails between climate scientists in England and United States. The results demonstrate that Climategate had a significant effect on public beliefs in global warming and trust in scientists. The loss of trust in scientists, however, was primarily among individuals with a strongly individualistic worldview or politically conservative ideology. Nonetheless, Americans overall continue to trust scientists more than other sources of information about global warming.
The article explains the variation of climate change salience in party manifestos, examining the effects of party characteristics. Creating a novel measure of parties’ climate change salience based on Comparative Manifesto Project data, the article finds that parties have broadly not made climate change a salient issue, though significant differences remain. Left–right ideology significantly helps explain these differences and is more important than any other party characteristic in explaining the variation. This underlines the importance of ideology over economic and policy preferences, size and strategic incentives and incumbency constraints and points towards the partisan (as opposed to the valence) nature of the climate change issue. These results contrast to those of an identical analysis of environmental salience where ideology is found to have no effect, underlining how the two issues should be treated differently and lending further support to the argument that climate change is not a valence issue.
The New Politics of Class argues that reports of the death of class in Britain are premature. In fact, there has been huge social continuity in class divisions over the last fifty years, both in terms of economic inequality and political attitudes. The change that has occurred is political. Party policies, politicians’ rhetoric, and the social composition of political elites have radically altered. As Labour and the Conservatives became more similar, and more middle class, in the 1990s class differences in mainstream party preferences disappeared. It does not follow that class politics is dead, however. Formerly minor parties, notably UKIP, have taken disillusioned working class voters from the two main parties. More importantly, the middle class consensus offered by the mainstream parties has meant that working class people are now much less likely to vote. Britain, like the US, has followed a path of working class political exclusion, fundamentally undermining representative democracy. The New Politics of Class also explains the dramatic pattern of class voting at the 2016 EU referendum: direct democracy meant that for the first time in decades there was a clear political choice which exposed the continuing divisions between the classes.
2012 American National Election Study data supplemented with monthly temperature data from the United States Historical Climatology Network are used to examine how religion, politics, and weather and climate affect views of global warming. Evangelical fundamentalism is the most consistent factor among all religion-related variables in determining perceptions of global warming, those more oriented toward evangelical fundamentalism being less likely than others to believe in the existence, anthropogenic cause, and adverse impact of global warming. Controlling for the effects of traditional political predisposition variables, including party identification and political ideology, support for the Tea Party plays a dominant role in determining views of global warming; support for the Tea Party leading to higher likelihood of disbelief in the existence, anthropogenic cause, and negative impact of global warming. Warming winters coupled with cooling springs of the past decade are positively related with belief in the existence of global warming.
Although populist1 movements are usually sparked off by specific social and economic problems, their common feature is a political appeal to the people, and a claim to legitimacy that rests on the democratic ideology of popular sovereignty and majority rule. Analyses of populism often point to the tension within western democracy between this populist tradition and liberal constitutionalism. Certainly, there are difficulties in reconciling the project of giving power to the people with the drive to restrain power within constitutional limits, but concentration on this particular problem leaves unexplained the enduring strength of populist-democratic ideology and the ways in which it sustains populist movements. In this chapter I will argue that in order to understand populism we need to be aware of a complex and elusive paradox that lies at the heart of modern democracy. Crudely stated, the paradox is that democratic politics does not and cannot make sense to most of the people it aims to empower. The most inclusive and accessible form of politics ever achieved is also the most opaque. Precisely because it is the most inclusive form of politics, democracy needs the transparency that ideology can supply, and yet the ideology that should communicate politics to the people cannot avoid being systematically misleading.
The far right party family is the fastest-growing party family in Europe. In addition to describing the ideological makeup of the far right party family, this review examines demand-side and supply-side explanations for its electoral success. Demand-side explanations focus on the grievances that create the "demand" for far right parties, whereas supply-side explanations focus on how the choices that far right parties make and the political opportunity structure in which they act influence their success. The review finishes by suggesting that far right scholars must recognize the interaction between demand-side and supply-side factors in their empirical analyses in order to draw valid inferences and that it would be productive to pay more attention to the political geography of far right support and the different stages of far right success.
This article aims to explain why market-based climate policies (carbon levies and emissions trading) have had limited success at the national level in “liberal-market economies” like Australia, Canada, and the United States. This situation is paradoxical to the extent that market environmentalism is often thought to be a concept tailored to the political traditions and policy paradigms in these states. I argue this occurs because precisely in such economies, workers have been the least protected from the market and the effects of globalization, leading to a squeeze on incomes and public services, and providing fertile ground for a virulently antitax politics. When coupled with the disproportionately carbon-intensive lifestyles in these states and the strength of fossil fuel interests, it becomes extremely easy and effective for opponents of climate policy to frame carbon prices as an onerous tax on workers and families. The article explores how this strategy has functioned at a discursive level and considers what this situation implies for climate policy advocates in carbon-intensive, neoliberal polities.
The UK Independence Party (UKIP) is the most significant new party in British politics for a generation. In recent years UKIP and their charismatic leader Nigel Farage have captivated British politics, media and voters. Yet both the party and the roots of its support remain poorly understood. Where has this political revolt come from? Who is supporting them, and why? How are UKIP attempting to win over voters? And how far can their insurgency against the main parties go? Drawing on a wealth of new data – from surveys of UKIP voters to extensive interviews with party insiders – in this book prominent political scientists Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin put UKIP's revolt under the microscope and show how many conventional wisdoms about the party and the radical right are wrong. Along the way they provide unprecedented insight into this new revolt, and deliver some crucial messages for those with an interest in the state of British politics, the radical right in Europe and political behaviour more generally.
This article starts from the assumption that the current process of globalization or denationalization leads to the formation of a new structural conflict in Western European countries, opposing those who benefit from this process against those who tend to lose in the course of the events. The structural opposition between globalization 'winners' and 'losers' is expected to constitute potentials for political mobilization within national political contexts, the mobilization of which is expected to give rise to two intimately related dynamics: the transformation of the basic structure of the national political space and the strategic repositioning of the political parties within the transforming space. The article presents several hypotheses with regard to these two dynamics and tests them empirically on the basis of new data concerning the supply side of electoral politics from six Western European countries (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland). The results indicate that in all the countries, the new cleavage has become embedded into existing two-dimensional national political spaces, that the meaning of the original dimensions has been transformed, and that the configuration of the main parties has become triangular even in a country like France.
This article inquires into how contemporary populist radical right parties relate to environmental issues of countryside and climate protection, by analyzing relevant discourses of the British National Party (BNP) and the Danish People's Party (DPP). It does so by looking at party materials
along three dimensions: the aesthetic, the symbolic, and the material. The article discusses to what extent the parties' political stances on environmental issues are conditioned by deeper structures of nationalist ideology and the understandings of nature embedded therein. It illustrates
a fundamental difference between the way nationalist actors engage in, on the one hand, the protection of nature as national countryside and landscape, epitomizing the nation's beauty, harmony and purity over which the people are sovereign. On the other hand, they deny or cast doubt on environmental
risks located at a transnational level, such as those that relate to climate. The article argues that this apparent inconsistency is rooted in the ideological tenets of nationalism as the transnational undermines the nationalist ideal of sovereignty.
Despite the findings of climate scientists, the proportions of climate sceptics appear to be increasing in many countries. We model social and political background, value orientations and the influence of CO2 emissions per capita and vulnerability to climate change upon climate scepticism, drawing upon data from the International Social Survey Programme. Substantial differences in the levels of climate scepticism are apparent between nations. Yet cross national data show that climate sceptics are not merely the mirror image of environmentalists. Typical predictors of environmental issue concern, such as education level, postmaterial value orientations and age are poor predictors of climate scepticism. Affiliation with conservative political parties, gender, being unconcerned about ‘the environment’ or having little trust in government are consistent predictors of scepticism. Climate change scepticism is also correlated positively with CO2 emissions and vulnerability to climate change. While high levels of scepticism have been documented among citizens of the United States, scepticism is as high or higher in countries such as Australia, Norway and New Zealand.
Attitude polarization between conservative and progressive politicians over global warming has an important influence upon public acceptance of action on climate change. Political party identification theorists claim that political elites provide cues that guide party supporters on complex political issues. In Australia, as in the USA, the UK and elsewhere, public attitudes on climate change are deeply divided on the basis of party identification and political ideology. Multivariate analyses of Australian candidate and voter survey data show that coalition candidates and their supporters are far less likely than their Labor or Greens counterparts to believe global warming will pose a serious threat to their way of life. Attitudes toward global warming are also more polarized according to party allegiance among candidates than among voters. Controlling for social background and political ideology, Coalition identifiers are less concerned about the dangers of climate change, far less supportive of the carbon tax and less likely to support renewable energy options than Greens or Labor identifiers are, but much more supportive of nuclear power as an alternative energy source.
The populist radical right constitutes the most successful party family in postwar Western Europe. Many accounts in both academia and the media warn of the growing influence of populist radical right parties (PRRPs), the so‐called ‘verrechtsing’ (or right turn) of European politics, but few provide empirical evidence of it. This lecture provides a first comprehensive analysis of the alleged effects of the populist radical right on the people, parties, policies and polities of Western Europe. The conclusions are sobering. The effects are largely limited to the broader immigration issue, and even here PRRPs should be seen as catalysts rather than initiators, who are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the introduction of stricter immigration policies. The lecture ends by providing various explanations for the limited impact of PRRPs, but it is also argued that populist parties are not destined for success in opposition and failure in government. In fact, there are at least three reasons why PRRPs might increase their impact in the near future: the tabloidisation of political discourse; the aftermath of the economic crisis; and the learning curve of PRRPs. Even in the unlikely event that PRRPs will become major players in West European politics, it is unlikely that this will lead to a fundamental transformation of the political system. PRRPs are not a normal pathology of European democracy, unrelated to its basic values, but a pathological normalcy, which strives for the radicalisation of mainstream values.
UK real wage growth has slowed down, stagnated and recently turned sharply negative. We document the nature of real wage changes across the wage distribution over the last three decades, showing that recent patterns represent a distinct break of trend that pre-dates the onset of recession. We explore whether unemployment has become a stronger moderating influence on real wage growth and report, using aggregate economy-wide and regional panel data, that real wage–unemployment sensitivities have become stronger in the period from 2003 onwards. Finally, we offer some assessment of possible drivers of this increased sensitivity of real wages to unemployment.
