Climate Change as a Driver for Participation? How Attitudes towards Global Warming Influence Political Behaviour

Since the beginning of the Fridays for Future protests, more and more people started to engage in several protest activities to demand more measurements for climate mitigation. These activities increasingly include more extreme formats of protests like civil disobedience. In Germany, people have occupied forests and abandoned towns (e.g., Hambacher Forst and more recently, Lüzerath in the end of 2022) and since last year the protest group of Letzte Generation uses several means of civil disobedience like sticking themselves to the street to block traffic. In the participation literature, these formats are discussed as non-conventional or non-institutional participation which is differentiated from conventional or institutional formats like voting, contacting politicians, and working for a political party (Garcıa-Albacete 2014, Stark 2019). Non-institutional formats are usually chosen when the other formats are no longer sufficient and an estrangement between the government and the citizen is developed (Stark 2019). Therefore, participation can be an expression of people not feeling represented and heard. The protest groups in regard to climate change express their dissatisfaction with the climate policy of the government. This raises the question if climate change is a topic that motivates people to participate more politically. Although participation in relation to climate change has already been studied in relation to specific climate action in several ways (Munson et al. 2021, Boumann et al. 2020, Bateman and Conner 2016), a more general investigation in how people think about climate change influences the political participation behavior in general is lacking so far. This paper aims to understand if and to what extent there are differences in the political behavior between people who take the climate change seriously and people who do not. Following the state of research, it is assumed that people who take climate change seriously and support climate protection participate more and choose more non-institutional forms than people who do not. This hypothesis is tested by using recent data from an online survey conducted in November 2022 in Germany. First findings indicate that there is no pattern for institutional or non-institutional formats regarding the effect of climate attitudes. Nevertheless, the findings suggest that both people who are doubting man-made climate change and people who support climate mitigation policies are more willing to participate politically. This counts for institutional formats as contacting politicians and non-institutional as civil disobedience and lawful demonstrations. It seems like climate change is motivating people to participate in several forms. The paper will therefore help to understand how the climate crisis influences political behavior by learning about the political participation of both people who have doubts about climate change and those who want more climate mitigation.