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Diverging Beliefs on Climate Change and Climate Policy: The Role of Political Orientation

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Abstract

Using longitudinal data from two household surveys in 2017 and 2019, we analyze attitudes toward climate change and climate policy in Germany. We find that nearly 20% of respondents state that they do not believe in climate change, and more than 30% are doubtful that climate change is mainly caused by human action. Moreover, we detect that political orientation is strongly correlated with these attitudes, as respondents inclined to Germany’s right-wing populist party AfD are substantially more climate-skeptical and object to climate policies more frequently. Even though our results show that climate change skepticism increased between 2017 and 2019, coinciding with the rise of the Fridays for Future movement, AfD voters did not move further away from the average respondent during this period. Moreover, fixed-effects estimations show that the climate attitudes of voters who switch to AfD during the study period hardly change, indicating that the orientation towards the AfD does not change climate attitudes. Instead, AfD might attract people who were already climate skeptical.

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Notes

  1. We use the terms climate skepticism and climate denial interchangeably as they are both used in the literature. However, there is a debate whether climate skepticism is an accurate term (see Björnberg et al. 2017).

  2. We refer to the AfD as a right-wing populist party, as this is the common formulation and is considered appropriate, even if the term is not clearly defined (Jesse and Panreck 2017). See also Häusler (2018) for a debate on the political classification of the AfD.

  3. For the full set of questions and our selection, see Table A3 in the appendix.

  4. The results of the probit estimations are available upon request.

  5. Tables A8–A14 in the appendix show the regression tables including the number of observations and the adjusted R2 for this and all other models whose graphical results are presented in this paper.

  6. As a robustness check, we include pro-environmental attitudes in the regression. Unsurprisingly, these are strongly associated with climate change scepticism as shown in Table A8, but the inclusion of this variable has little bearing on the remaining coefficients. Yet, as pro-environmental attitudes might be endogenous, we have decided to omit it for the main analysis.

  7. For our main outcomes, we illustrate the agreement rates for each party (see Figs. 2, A1, and A4).

  8. Beside political orientation the residence seems to play a major role for the support of carbon taxes. Respondents in rural areas are about 8 percentage points less likely to support a carbon tax compared to respondents who reside in urban areas (Table A11). This finding emphasizes difficulties for the implementation of a carbon tax owed to a rural–urban divide, as also documented by Douenne and Fabre (2020). Similarly, rural respondents are less likely support the promotion of green electricity and the coal phase-out, but the differences are more modest.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Mark A. Andor, Thomas K. Bauer, Gunter Bensch, Linus Mattauch, Jörg Peters, Christoph M. Schmidt, Maxie Sievert, and Vance, as well as participants of the 27th Annual Conference of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists for very helpful discussions and comments. Moreover, we are grateful to Marielena Krieg and Valerie Peetz for excellent research assistance. We gratefully acknowledge financial support by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) in the project Ariadne (grant 3SFK5C0).

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  1. RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, Hohenzollernstr. 1-3, 45128, Essen, Germany

    Leonard Knollenborg

  2. Bochum University of Applied Sciences, Am Hochschulcampus 1, 44801, Bochum, Germany

    Stephan Sommer

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Knollenborg, L., Sommer, S. Diverging Beliefs on Climate Change and Climate Policy: The Role of Political Orientation. Environ Resource Econ 84, 1031–1049 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-022-00747-1

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