Climate, Class and Culture: Political Issues as Cultural Signifiers in the US

Abstract

Since the 1970s, social scientists have argued that general pro-environmental attitudes have diffused throughout American society, rendering socio-demographics largely irrelevant in predicting support for such issues. The public reaction to the issue of climate change, however, is an exception to this narrative. While media bias, ideological framing, and business influence are often invoked to explain public apathy, I argue that ignoring class and culture in determining why climate change is so divisive is a potentially significant oversight. Using the cultural theory of Bourdieu, I examine how the conception of and reaction to climate change varies with economic and cultural capital using data from 40 interviews of Boston-area respondents. The results suggest that climate change may indeed be a ‘classed’ issue – both in how the respondents conceive of it in the first place, and how they speak of social class in the context of it. The results suggest that social scientists should go beyond rational-choice and media framing explanations, to take two prolific examples, in exploring how disagreements on the importance of climate change persist in the US.