Contestation uncovered: Public responses to coercive climate policies in OECD countries in news media coverage

Effective and rapid climate change action requires coercive policies (e.g., regulation, taxation/pricing, phase-outs) to accelerate low-carbon transitions. Implementing such policies at the national level is often subject to a fierce political debate and sometimes even large-scale public contestation (e.g., the Yellow Vests movement in France, acrimonious anti-carbon pricing protests in Australia, and court challenges to carbon pricing in Canada). Such responses threaten policy durability by undermining the effectiveness of climate policy instruments and the robustness of wider climate policy agendas. However, when, where, and why contentious public responses occur (or not) remains unclear. This paper aims to systematically examine the variation and prevalence of public responses, both contentious and not, to coercive climate policies. We develop and apply a typology of public responses to coercive policy spanning public opinion and public mobilization. We analyze a systematic sample of 55 national-level coercive climate change mitigation policies across 23 OECD countries initiated between 2010-2022. Policy domains cover framework policies and energy policies for the sector with the largest CO2 emissions per country. The medium-N sample enables comparison across a large set of cases, which is rare in climate policy scholarship, where small-N case studies are most common. Cases are interpretively coded using politically-centrist mass media (newspapers) sampled systematically and analyzed over a multi-year period. This approach enables an unbiased categorization and estimate of the prevalence of contentious and non-contentious public responses. Findings reveal a relatively low prevalence of contentious responses to coercive climate policies. The sporadic picture of contention suggests that coercive policies are not always highly controversial or at least, are not presented by the media as such. Contestation that does occur and does get news media coverage is mainly associated with carbon taxation/pricing. Furthermore, not all identified instances of contention can necessarily be classified as a fully-fledged backlash, despite increasing concern about this among climate scholars and practitioners in recent years. Overall, the paper illuminates agency of mass publics in the post-adoption politics of climate policymaking and suggests a need for comparative analysis of causes of variation in public responses, considering interactions between policy design and social context.