In this paper, we draw on an original survey conjoint experiment fielded in the immediate days before the 2024 UK general election on a sample of 2,095 respondents representative of the British public. We assess the impact of hypothetical party candidates’ position-taking on selected climate policy issues on respondents’ electoral support for those candidates. We selected three climate policy issues that were relatively prominently discussed in party manifestos and during the campaign: North Sea oil and gas extraction, ultra-low emission zones, and the issue of the windfall tax on excess oil and gas profits.
Candidates’ policy positions were manipulated in such a way that they could advocate between deregulating vs. strongly regulating high-emitting economic and social activities. Furthermore, we allowed in our design the linkage of climate taxation issues to another policy issue – the NHS (National Health Service) as an issue of high public salience – through means of revenue recycling. Our preliminary, top-level results suggest that certain policy narratives certainly exerted a notable influence on candidate choice. Moreover, we provide more fine-grained analyses of these results through sub-group analyses (e.g. party vote intention, age groups, urban/rural groups, EU referendum vote). These show that, while the NHS-revenue-recycling effect holds across most analysed sub-groups, there is also notable variation in how the other candidate positions impact different sub-groups’ candidate preferences.
Our study provides valuable lessons for how clever climate policy position-taking and policy area linkages can lead to widespread electoral mobilization and support in an electoral context in which climate change was at the margins of saliency.