Social Identity and Risk Perception Explain Participation in the Swiss Youth Climate Strikes

Adrian Brügger,Moritz Gubler,Katharine Steentjes,Stuart B Capstick

doi:10.3390/su122410605

Abstract

Since late 2018, young people around the world have united to demand greater action on climate change. Aside from their stated concerns and demands, however, very little is known about why young people have been joining this growing movement. Using a large sample (N = 4057) of people in Switzerland aged between 14 and 25, we show that social identity is most strongly associated with participation, followed by beliefs about the effectiveness of youth strikes, level of education, and worry about climate change. Our findings affirm the relevance of both climate change risk perceptions and social identity-related processes for collective climate change action, and pave the way for promising opportunities in theory development and integration. The study also provides lessons for those who seek to maintain and increase collective action on climate change: concern about climate change is an important motivating factor, but social identity processes are at least as relevant for young people’s participation.

Highlights

From small beginnings, youth strikes on climate change have grown rapidly, achieving much in a short time: extensive media attention, support from almost 27,000 scientists [1], and the foundation of numerous like-minded regional, national, and international groups such as “parents for future” and “artists for future.” The youth strikes are likely to have increased public awareness and concern about climate change [2,3] and to have added momentum for changes in the political landscape, especially in Europe [4]
Because such general samples often include only a small proportion of people who participate in collective action similar to the youth strikes [8], we encouraged members of climate strike networks to share our invitation to participate with others in their groups on WhatsApp
The proportion of students in primary school and upper secondary school was higher in our sample than in the reference population (+0.3% and +5.6%), whereas fewer respondents were attending lower secondary school than in the reference population (−5.8%; these figures were obtained upon request from the Federal Statistical Office; the closest publicly available data can be found here: [64])

Summary

Introduction

Youth strikes on climate change have grown rapidly, achieving much in a short time: extensive media attention, support from almost 27,000 scientists [1], and the foundation of numerous like-minded regional, national, and international groups such as “parents for future” and “artists for future.” The youth strikes are likely to have increased public awareness and concern about climate change [2,3] and to have added momentum for changes in the political landscape, especially in Europe [4]. The youth strikes are likely to have increased public awareness and concern about climate change [2,3] and to have added momentum for changes in the political landscape, especially in Europe [4]. Previous research has investigated what motivates people to take personal action on climate change [5,6] and why they participate in collective action in general [7,8,9]. While concern about climate change can be considered an intuitive and reasonable explanation for such participation, previous research draws attention to a range of other relevant factors influencing people’s involvement in protest, including a person’s moral convictions, how they see themselves in relation to a social movement, and their emotional investment in it [10,11,12]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion