Who Learns How: An ACF Study Exploring Individual Attributes of Climate Change Learners

Policy-oriented learning is a complex process, compounded when learning occurs in the context of highly scientific or technical policy issues. The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) posits, however, that there may be more room for policy-oriented learning in natural systems. While scholars have long explored learning as a concept, we still lack longitudinal evidence through which to test our theories and even within the multitude of studies within the ACF, there is not agreement on when we might see learning and who might be most likely to learn. The research proposed here explores policy-oriented learning within a natural system – climate change – and tests expectations about who we might expect to learn. We use 22 waves of longitudinal panel dataset that explores individual-level perceptions of environmental problems. First, we extend prior work that established a new operationalization of learning as multifaceted: belief change combined with the permanence – or lack thereof – of that change over time. We then isolate patterns of learning and test against individual attributes such as sociodemographic characteristics, political ideology, and preexisting preferences regarding policymaking. Our findings are triangulated at multiple levels of the ACF tripartite belief system. Our results indicate that we can expect more or less policy-oriented learning among certain types of individuals, and we conclude with a set of suggested hypotheses to be tested in future research.