When Demand for Change Backfires: How Ambitious Messengers Undermine Climate Policy Support

Green parties in government have recently faced public backlash against the climate policies they aimed to implement. This even included interventions whose core concepts were outlined by previous administrations with less ambitious climate policy goals. This raises a broader question: do parties associated with ambitious or radical demands for change face structural disadvantages in securing public support for climate policy, regardless of the policy content itself? Existing research shows that party cues shape policy preferences primarily through sociological factors such as party identification. Far less attention has been paid to how external political characteristics of messengers, such as their perceived ideological position, affect public support. I shift attention to these political characteristics and argue that when climate policies are associated with parties perceived as holding particularly radical positions on and issue area, public support for the policy declines. Such parties, and in turn their policies, may be viewed as lacking broad societal backing or pragmatism, which can undermine public confidence in policies linked to them. I test this expectation using a large survey-embedded experiment conducted in Germany (N = 3200). Respondents in the control group received information about a climate policy targeting the building sector. In the treatment group, respondents received identical policy information, but the proposal was explicitly linked to the party they had previously identified as holding the most radical pro-climate position. The results show that linking a climate policy to the party perceived as most radical significantly reduces public support compared to the control condition. Crucially, this effect is strongest among respondents who do not hold clear positive or negative sentiments toward the party in question, indicating that the “radical party cue” operates independently of party identification. Mediation analyses reveal that this decline in support is driven primarily by reduced perceptions that the policy enjoys broad societal backing. Concerns about a lack of pragmatism increase mainly among negative partisans, while perceptions of the policy’s long-term effectiveness remain largely unaffected across partisan groups. Overall, the findings highlight a tension between ambitious climate advocacy and public support, suggesting that messenger effects play a crucial role in climate governance even beyond sociological cues such as party identity.