Abstract
The increasing social consciousness about the causes and consequences of climate change has not led to a correspondingly high support for concrete mitigation or adaptation policies. Thus, more research is needed about the factors influencing citizen’s support for such climate change policies. In this study, we explore the effects on Spaniards’ support for one mitigation policy (car policy) and one adaptation policy (water policy) of five attitudinal factors: government response efficacy beliefs, people’s feeling of responsibility to mitigate climate change, personal self-efficacy beliefs, people’s disposition to resist change and psychological distance from climate change. We use data from an online survey implemented in the Netquest opt-in panel in Spain (N = 2290). We use structural equation modelling to control for spurious effects and test the fit of the model. Moreover, estimates are corrected for measurement errors. The results reveal that the most important factor affecting Spaniards’ support for both mitigation and adaptation policies is the perceived government response efficacy. Furthermore, we identified relevant differences regarding the importance of the above-mentioned five attitudinal factors depending on the climate change policy studied. More precisely, while government response efficacy and people’s feeling of responsibility to mitigate climate change have a direct effect on support for both policies, personal self-efficacy and people’s resistance to change only affect support for the mitigation policy directly. On the contrary, psychological distance to climate change only has a direct effect on support for the adaptation policy. Our results provide new insights into the causal mechanisms behind citizens’ support for climate change policies.
Highlights
Public perception of mitigation and adaptation policies is affected by the “principleimplementation gap” (Krosnick and MacInnis, 2013, p. 28), i.e. people may support a policy principle, but at the same time, oppose any specific policy proposal aiming at making it a reality
We estimate the causal effects on Spaniards‟ support for one mitigation and one adaptation climate change policy of five attitudinal factors: government response efficacy beliefs, people‟s feeling of responsibility to mitigate climate change, personal self-efficacy beliefs, people‟s disposition to resist change and psychological distance from climate change
While 65.4% of respondents are affected by the car policy, only 27.3% are affected by the water policy
Summary
Public perception of mitigation and adaptation policies is affected by the “principleimplementation gap” (Krosnick and MacInnis, 2013, p. 28), i.e. people may support a policy principle, but at the same time, oppose any specific policy proposal aiming at making it a reality. In Spain, evidence from the Centre for Sociological Research Barometer from November 2018 shows that 93.4% of Spaniards believe that human action has an important influence on climate change and 88.0% think that this phenomenon requires a change of our current societies, the support for specific mitigation and adaptation policies is substantively lower. We estimate the causal effects on Spaniards‟ support for one mitigation and one adaptation climate change policy of five attitudinal factors: government response efficacy beliefs, people‟s feeling of responsibility to mitigate climate change, personal self-efficacy beliefs, people‟s disposition to resist change and psychological distance from climate change. Our focus is on the effects on policy support of these five factors because, they have been previously studied, results are not conclusive and their relationship with policy support is puzzling. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first causal analysis considering all five factors together in order to compare the size of their effects and identify if these effects are direct or indirect
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