"Climate policy kills jobs": Unveiling economic fears and ideological motives behind policy resistance

Persistent resistance to climate mitigation policies is partly attributed to concerns about potential adverse economic consequences, especially regarding job stability. The dominant job-killing narrative, used by policy oppositions among both the mass public and elected officials, underscores these fears. What has received limited scholarly attention so far is the narrative’s dual facets. While this narrative might reflect genuine economic worries arising from perceived employment vulnerabilities, it might also be a mere tool to obscure other political and ideological motives against climate policies. Experts, including researchers and science journalists, have made efforts to counter this narrative, offering extensive evidence that such policies, overall, do not harm the economy. But if ideological motives are also fueling policy resistance, efforts to correct people’s perceptions about policies’ negative economic impacts or to offer targeted compensation to the policy’s economic "losers" may not sway public opinions. In other words, determining the relative influence of economic fears and ideological motives on policy resistance is crucial for refining future policy design and communication. This paper addresses these issues using a survey experiment (UK, N=1450) and an objective job risk index gauging the relative risk of existing occupations in the face of stringent climate policies. After constructing the job risk index, we first measure the perception gap between individuals’ views on their jobs’ transition risk and the index. Second, we analyze belief updating among participants exposed to objective risk information as an information treatment in the survey. Third, by comparing the average policy stances of the respondents who were and were not confronted with the objective risk index, we estimate the causal effect of corrected risk perceptions on policy support. Finally, in all the above analyses, we examine whether variations in perception gaps, belief updates, and responses to the information treatment, respectively, correlate with political or other identity-related factors. Insofar as individuals are genuinely accuracy-oriented, their belief updating behavior should be congruent with the direction of correction made based on the objective information. If not, our study can reveal whether the incongruence is partly due to ideologically motivated reasoning. Similarly, if "job-killing" concerns indeed drive policy resistance, individuals’ policy stance should be influenced by upward or downward corrections provided on their job risk perceptions. If not, again, we are interested in testing whether weaker treatment effects are explained by ideology. The relationship between ideological beliefs and economic concerns is a source of tension and confusion in the debate on many politicized issues beyond climate, including, but not limited to, migration, refugee protection, and public health. Our findings can potentially reveal common challenges in policy formulation and communication across these domains.