Welfare States, Social Classes and the Support for Climate Change Mitigation in Europe

How do different European welfare states affect the political support of different social classes for climate change adaptation and mitigation? Despite the increased relevance of the climate crisis and inequality, as well as enduring challenges to the welfare state, few studies to date seek to theorize and empirically analyze the relationship between welfare state and support for addressing the climate crisis. This paper seeks to close this gap by explaining the varying relationship between environmental policy preferences, inequality and social classes, and welfare state institutions across European countries. More specifically, we explore the crucial role played by the generosity and funding of the welfare state in shaping the views and preferences of citizens in different social classes concerning individually environmentally-friendly action and delegation of climate-related issues to the government. Our conceptual starting point is that welfare state institutions shape social classes` preferences and opportunities regarding climate change mitigation because they affect both their willingness and ability to change their behavior to be more environmentally friendly and their interest in supporting governments to enact climate change mitigating policies. Using a merged dataset combining the Eurobarometer 2019 and several country-level indicators of welfare state structure and funding, our results show that increasing taxation rates reduce individual level environmental actions most strongly among higher social classes, whereas higher social expenditures primarily increase lower classes` engagement in favour of addressing climate change. Thus, advanced political economies seeking to adapt to climate change are faced with a dilemma: to increase the political viability of climate change adaptation and mitigation among lower social classes requires a larger welfare state to protect and compensate them for the costs associated with changed behavior and costly government policies, but funding such a large welfare state in turns calls for higher taxes which undermines support from higher social classes.