Political Populism, Responsiveness, and Public Support for Climate Mitigation

Most policymakers and scholars agree that far-reaching measures are necessary to mitigate climate change. However, in a recent survey, only 48 % of US citizens agreed that the earth is warming because of human activity. Such climate change scepticism undermines existing climate policies and reduces the potential for more ambitious rules. While most research on this subject focuses on political ideology and socio-demographics to explain weak support for climate change policies, we propose that climate politics is especially vulnerable to populist critique, as this policy area is elite-driven, technical and abstract. We argue that a) stronger populist attitudes are associated with lower support for climate policy and b) perceptions of elite/government responsiveness are important heuristics for individuals forming their preferences concerning climate policies. To test these arguments we collected original and nationally representative US survey data (N=3,000), both in the form of observational data and data from a survey-embedded experiment. The results indicate that the association between populist political attitudes and climate policy attitudes is strongly conditional on party identification. They also show that non-populist discourse, ensuring citizens that the political elite is responsive to their needs and preferences, increases support for climate policies, whereas populist discourse highlighting the elites' non-responsiveness does not affect policy support. Our findings offer a starting point for similar analyses in other elite-driven and technical policy domains, such as international trade.