If You Don’t Believe in Climate Change, You are a Conservative or Not. The Relation Between Climate Change Belief and Political Ideology in Poland

There is a growing agreement in social sciences that a lot of variance attitudes on climate change falls along political lines. The conservatives show less concern over climate change than liberals. This political gap is also considered to be one of the major problems in climate change mitigation. Large parts of society do not to want to engage into pro-environmental actions as they threaten their social identity. In current research we analyze whether this political distinction occurs also in Poland. We show that although there is a relation between political ideology, general pro-environmental attitudes and climate change beliefs the effects are very weak. The same effect occurs when we analyze the connection between support for different forms of energy collection. We show it based on a meta-analysis of several representative Polish surveys as well as our own representative panel study. We show also that there is the gap between the ideologization of climate change at the governmental level and society. Although at the level of official state representatives’ pro-environmental attitudes are perceived as a part of left-wing ideology, this effect is not transferred into wider society. Based on the socio-psychological research we propose also how to counter act the possible ideologization of climate change as well as more general environmental issues.