Climate Change and Attitudes toward Democracy: A Citizens’ Perspective

The literature on climate change and sustainability has seen intense debates about the relative advantages and disadvantages of democracies and autocracies in mastering the challenges of climate change mitigation. With this debate still ongoing, it is striking that to our knowledge, the relationship between climate change perceptions and attitudes toward democracy has not been discussed systematically on the level of citizens. This is surprising as citizen attitudes should become more and more important in the face of growing levels of politicization of climate change issues. We argue that there are at least two fundamentally contrasting arguments on how citizen perceptions of climate change and their views on democracy should be related. A more classical argument holds that societal debates around climate change strongly overlap with other recent cleavages, indicating that cosmopolitan, highly educated and wealthy individuals are not only more likely to acknowledge the human-caused nature of climate change and support decisive mitigation measures but also to support democracy in its present state. More recent arguments on the normative desirability and empirical emergence of “green populism” expect those citizens most aware of climate change and its effects to become increasingly frustrated with – representative forms of – democracy, leading them to lean more and more toward either direct forms of democracy or even autocratic rule. In this paper, we test these two broad arguments by using the most recent wave of the European Social Survey, which includes a wide range of items measuring attitudes toward both climate change and democracy for 25 countries. The findings of our multilevel analysis, which interacts individual-level attitudes and country-level factors related to both concepts, are of great interest not only to researchers on public opinion and political psychology, but also to the audience of the broader debate on whether democratic politics will be able to master the sustainability transformation.