Not in My Basement! The Political Economy of Public Backlash to Climate Policy

Climate change mitigation has been an enormous challenge for governments around the world, since policies that address the issue often turn out to be highly contested. Climate policies have thus frequently faced popular backlash. In this paper, we investigate the drivers of this backlash. For this purpose, we define policy backlash among the mass public as a rapid downward adjustment of public support in reaction to policy exposure. Building on policy feedback theory, we hypothesize that disproportionate exposure to the costs of a new policy activates self-interest, diminishing the willingness to support and pay for similar policies, and potentially even causing a loss of trust in political institutions. We test these propositions for the case of the German heating reform, which introduced the first phaseout policy for fossil-fuel heating systems in Germany. The reform sparked a contentious public debate after a draft bill was leaked by tabloid media in February 2023. The government's proposal would have imposed high upfront costs upon many homeowners who still rely on fossil fuels for heating. After heavy countermobilization from the opposition, the government watered down its ambitions and passed a revised version of the bill. To test our theoretical propositions, we exploit a quasi-experimental setting by drawing from panel survey data (n = 8,335), which we collected in four waves directly before, during, and after the contentious media debate surrounding the policy process. Our data provides a unique opportunity to estimate mass public feedback effects, not only after, but also during the policy process. Applying a difference-in-difference design, we estimate the effects of the policy change on the attitudes of those disproportionately exposed to the costs of the policy. We find that cost exposure causes a significant decline in willingness to pay for further climate policy and trust in government, particularly in the low- and middle-income classes. These effects sustained over the entire survey period, despite the government's backtracking. These findings suggest that public backlash to climate policy is strongly driven by affordability concerns. Although this, of course, does not fully explain the phenomenon in question, it does show that material questions are at the heart of it. In sum, our paper offers both a political economy theory of policy backlash among the mass public and robust evidence in support of this theory. We show that ex-ante assessments of public opinion underestimate the opposition to climate policy. When the costs of climate policy become tangible, individuals adapt their preferences and attitudes.