Representational Gaps in Politicians’ Climate Change Policy Preferences and Public Opinion Perceptions

Climate change is one of the main challenges of our time. There is a broad consensus among scientists that without robust measures to curb climate change, the repercussions will be severe. The policies needed to halt climate change, however, are not in place yet. Despite the urgent calls for decisive policy action in scientific reports, government’s responses to the crisis are simply insufficient (IPCC, 2023). While various reasons for the shortage of decisive climate change policies exist, one understudied explanation is that politicians are not in favor of such policies (1), or that they are in favor of it but do not dare to pursue them because they anticipate electoral backlash when doing so (2). Scholarly work on democratic representation has shown that two key drives of political decision-making are the policy preferences of elected representatives and their perceptions of citizens’ preferences (Miller and Stokes 1963). In a representative democracy it is expected that this leads to policy output that reflects the policy preferences of the citizenry (Dahl 1989). In this original study, we look at climate change (in)action from a representation perspective and zoom in on the role of individual politicians. Drawing on unique surveys with local elected representatives (N = 920) and citizens in Belgium (N = 1,315), this study examines politicians’ support for a series of topical climate change policies and measures their views of citizens’ support for the same policies. Moreover, we benchmark politicians’ answers with citizens’ actual policy preferences on the same policy proposals. Our results suggest that politicians’ and citizens’ opinions about climate policies are somewhat similar but that citizens are overall a bit more favorable of climate policies than politicians are. In addition, we find that politicians systematically underestimate support for climate policies among the broader public, and this underestimation is more pronounced among younger politicians, right-wing politicians, and those with more extreme ideologies. These findings suggest a potential representation error with regard to climate policy. First, the own opinion of politicians deviates from the opinion of citizens, in an anti-climate direction. Second, politicians systematically underestimate public support for climate policies. Consequently, the dynamic of politicians’ acting on their own opinions and perceptions of public opinion, in the case of climate change politics, may lead to lower climate change action than is expected, or even warranted, from a representational point of view.