Abstract
Over the last few years, climate change has risen to the top of the agenda in many Western democracies, backed by a growing share of voters supporting climate protection policies. To understand how and why these changes came about, we revisit the question whether personal experiences with increasingly unusual local weather conditions affect people’s beliefs about climate change and their related attitudes. We first take a closer look at the theoretical underpinnings and extend the theoretical argument to account for the differential impact of different weather phenomena, as well as the role of prior beliefs and individual reference frames. Applying mixed-effects regressions to a novel dataset combining individual-level multi-wave panel survey data from up to 18,010 German voters collected from 2016 to 2019 with weather data from 514 weather stations, we show that personally experiencing unusual or extreme local weather did not shape people’s awareness of climate change as a political problem or their climate policy preferences in a sustained manner. Even among people who may be considered most likely to exhibit such effects, we did not detect them. Moreover, we demonstrate that the common modeling strategy of combining fixed-effects regression with clustered standard errors leads to severely reduced standard errors and substantively different results. We conclude that it cannot be taken for granted that personally experiencing extreme weather phenomena makes a difference in perceptions of climate change and related policy preferences.
Highlights
Over the last few years, climate change has risen to the top of the agenda in many Western democracies
The analysis suggests that effects of local weather conditions on beliefs about the existence of climate change, the awareness of climate change as a problem, and support for climate protection policies cannot be taken for granted
While there is evidence that experiencing unusual variations in local weather conditions or extreme weather events increases the likelihood of accepting the existence of climate change, the impact of personal experiences on attitudes that are more closely related to political action has received less empirical scrutiny
Summary
Over the last few years, climate change has risen to the top of the agenda in many Western democracies. The empirical evidence largely supports this linkage, the effects of objectively measured weather conditions tend to be small and ephemeral compared to other predictors of climate change beliefs and attitudes, including the effects of self-reported experiences with unusual or extreme weather (cf Hornsey et al 2016; Marquart-Pyatt et al 2014; McCright and Dunlap 2011). These findings could reflect the methodological challenges involved in matching weather and survey data but may point to more fundamental theoretical issues. There may be sound theoretical reasons not to expect large or lasting effects of personal experiences on climate change attitudes
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