Abstract
There is considerable variability in attitudes towards climate change between citizens of different countries. By using individual-level and country-level data, I examine if this variability in public opinion is partially caused by political party elites. The results show that when elites are united in their support for environmental issues, the perceived threat of climate change is higher than in countries where party elites are divided. The results also demonstrate that the perceived threat influences behavior related to climate change, and that threat mediates the effect of party positions. Consequently, the effect of party elites is stronger than previously acknowledged. The models rely on Generalized Method of Moments estimation and instrumental variables with clustering on EU member-states.
Highlights
Climatologists and other scientists who study climate change have overwhelmingly concluded that the world is going through an unprecedented temperature increase [1,2], yet this information has not uniformly been translated into a public opinion response across countries
This issue is examined with an endogeneity test, the generalized method of moments (GMM) distance, which is robust to violations of homoskedasticity
The results presented in this paper suggest that political party elites partially influence these differences in public opinion about climate change
Summary
Climatologists and other scientists who study climate change have overwhelmingly concluded that the world is going through an unprecedented temperature increase [1,2], yet this information has not uniformly been translated into a public opinion response across countries. Cross-national polls on climate change show that there are substantial differences between countries in how residents view climate change. While there are notable exceptions [4,5], not enough attention has been paid to the major differences that exist between countries in public opinion on climate change and how factors at the national level influence individuals. There are problematic issues of causality in this field that need to be addressed in more detail than they have been. This multilevel study aims to fill the gaps on what influences cross-national attitudes on climate change and how public opinion is transformed into behavior while at the same time accounting for potential causality problems
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