Abstract
In the face of accelerating global warming and attendant natural disasters, it is clear that governments all over the world eventually have to take measures to mitigate the most adverse consequences of climate change. However, the costs of these measures are likely to force governments to reconsider some of their tax and spending priorities, of which social spending is the largest expenditure item in developed welfare states. Unless carried out in a way that is considered as fair by most citizens, such trade-off is likely to add a new, ecological dimension to the existing social cleavages in people’s preferences for public provision. Whether or not the possible tensions between the two sets of policies have already resulted in the emergence of a new, eco-social divide in Europe is an open question. In this paper, we hypothesise that there are four distinct attitude groups in relation to welfare and climate change policies, and that the probability of belonging to any of these groups is influenced by individuals’ socioeconomic and ideological characteristics, as well as the country context in which they live. We test our hypotheses using data from the eighth round of the European Social Survey conducted in 2016/17 in multinomial regression models. Results suggest that across Europe people are considerably divided in their support of public welfare and climate policies, but that support for both dimensions is highest in the Nordic countries. At the micro level, we find political ideology and trust in public institutions to be the most important drivers of a newly emerging eco-social divide.
Highlights
IntroductionCognisant that effective climate change policies need to be socially legitimate (and progressive), scholars have called for fostering synergy between social and ecological policies [4,5,6]
In the face of accelerating global warming and attendant natural disasters, it is clear that governments all over the world, and especially in developed countries, will eventually have to take measures to address the most adverse consequences of climate change
This is because less than a quarter of Europeans (23%) were “eco-social enthusiasts” (ENTH), which implies having a positive stance towards public welfare and climate change policies
Summary
Cognisant that effective climate change policies need to be socially legitimate (and progressive), scholars have called for fostering synergy between social and ecological policies [4,5,6] Examples of such policies include generating new jobs in green industries, investing in public transport systems, insulating dwellings of low-income households, using targeted subsidies and cash transfers to redistribute revenue generated from environmental taxes, and so on. Markkanen and Anger-Kraavi [8] as well as Büchs and colleagues [4] find in their systematic reviews that climate change policies are likely to have adverse side-effects for poor and marginalised population sub-groups These policies are often regressive, imposing a heavier burden on low-income people unless some compensatory mechanisms are in place. Expecting that climate change and the policies addressing it disproportionally affect the poor and might spur new reactive and defensive politics, Elliott [9] even suggests to theorise climate change sociologically as loss instead of sustainability
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