The impact of perceived partisanship on climate policy support: A conceptual replication and extension of the temporal framing effect

Abstract

Bridging the political divide between liberals and conservatives is one of the biggest challenges in reaching broad public support of climate policies. Research has suggested that framing climate policies with respect to the past may reduce opposition by political conservatives, but recent attempts to replicate this effect have failed. A new perspective on these inconsistent findings may be offered by taking the influence of temporal framing on individuals' perception of the messenger into account. The present work investigated how implicit cues contained in temporal message framing as well as explicit political identity cues shape the perceived political orientation of a messenger and subsequent climate policy support by partisans. Across three experiments (Ntotal = 2012), we found that past (vs. future) framing and conservative (vs. liberal) party affiliation independently contributed to the messenger being perceived as more conservative. Past framing and conservative party affiliation increased endorsement of the messenger and the message by conservatives, but decreased endorsement by liberals. However, past framing and conservative party affiliation independently increased conservatives’ climate policy support, with mixed effects on liberals. Moreover, a temporal framing effect only emerged when messenger party affiliation was made explicit, suggesting that activating individuals' political identity facilitates the integration of implicit identity cues contained in temporal framings. We discuss the theoretical implications of our integrated account for the observation of partisan effects and reassess the potential of temporal framings to reduce the political divide on climate change.