Abstract
As climate change continues to be politically divisive, developing communications that align with right-leaning beliefs may increase bipartisan support for climate policy. In two experimental studies (Study 1, Australia, N = 558; Study 2, USA, N = 939), we tested whether an economic or national identity loss message would elicit greater support for mitigation and adaptation policies when compared to one another and to a control message. We also tested whether the direct effects of these loss-orientated messages were conditional on political orientation (specifically, identifying as politically right-leaning). In both studies, preliminary analyses indicated that there was a high level of support for both types of climate policy, but when compared to their left-wing counterparts, right-wing adherents were less likely to support mitigation and adaptation policies in either sample. Australian (Study 1) identification—although not American identity (Study 2)—also uniquely predicted adaptation support (but not mitigation support). There were no significant message frame or interaction effects in the Australian (Study 1) or US sample (Study 2). This suggests that neither an economic nor national identity loss message may be effective in overcoming the political polarization of climate change in Australia or the USA. Nevertheless, national identity could still play a useful role in Australian climate communications given its positive relationship to adaptation policy support and therefore warrants further investigation.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available as the conditions of ethical approval do not allow for this. However, they are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
Additional analyses indicated that the findings of Study 1 and Study 2 remained the same if participants who failed these comprehension checks were excluded or included in the dataset.
Data collection was completed before the change in Prime Ministership in August 2018, which occurred due to ongoing internal party disagreement in the Liberal/National Coalition regarding climate change and renewable energy policy.
Left-wing and right-wing were used as anchor points on the scale in Study 1 rather than the typical liberal and conservative anchor points seen in the research literature. This is because within the Australian context the major conservative party is called the Liberal Party, and as such it may have confused Australian participants who are not clear on the distinction between party labeling and ideological labeling.
We also assessed political values and beliefs with two additional measures of right-wing ideological beliefs for purposes outside the scope of this study. These included Social Dominance Orientation (SDO7) (Ho et al. 2015) and Right-Wing Authoritarianism (Dunwoody and Funke 2016). However, we ran the same analyses with SDO and RWA replacing the single-item measure of political orientation with either SDO or RWA to see whether the findings held. We observed the same pattern of results reported in this manuscript. Therefore, for the sake of clarity, the descriptives of SDO and RWA and associated analyses are instead reported in the supplementary materials.
Given the relationship between Australia identity and adaptation support, we also conducted exploratory analyses where national identity was inserted as the moderator for both Study 1 and Study 2. Analyses indicated that national identity did not have a moderating effect for either study, on either dependent variable. Detailed findings of these exploratory findings can be found in the supplementary materials.
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This research was supported in part by Deakin University School of Psychology internal Research Funds.
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All authors contributed to the conceptualization and writing the manuscript. AK and ML analyzed the data.
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Klas, A., Clarke, E.J.R., Fielding, K. et al. Investigating how economic and national identity loss messages impact climate change policy support. Climatic Change 175, 17 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-022-03472-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-022-03472-2