The Two-Sided Demand For Non-Democratic Climate Governance

Political science long treated a societal consensus for democracy as a truism. Recent research challenges this assumption suggesting that many citizens are democrats in name only. These citizens might be willing to trade-off democratic norms if they hold other, competing interests. Meanwhile, climate change is amongst the currently most salient issues. Debates around benefits and costs of climate action are becoming increasingly polarized. In this environment, citizens could hold such strong preferences for the future climate action course that they are willing to endorse non-democratic actions furthering their own agenda. The limited existing research in this matter exclusively focuses on citizens concerned about climate change, but I argue this paints an incomplete picture. Therefore, I use unique data from the German SOEP Innovation Sample that elicits respondents’ contextualized support for violating various democratic norms (e.g. freedom of speech, separation of power) on both sides of the climate action cleavage. Indeed, the non-democratic potential amongst those who favor and oppose further climate action is similarly high with one in four respondents reporting a general willingness to use non-democratic means to achieve their respective policy goals. Strong pro-democracy norms might further lead respondents to falsify their support for nondemocratic acts. I use two embedded list experiments to uncover these ‘fake’ democrats. This reveals substantial social desirability, with the hidden non-democratic support in both political camps being estimated at over 40%. Taken together, I provide a crucial and better assessment of the threat the climate cleavage poses to the democratic system.