How We Feel About Climate Change and Why it Matters for Democracy: an Empirical Investigation of Democratic Preferences and Climate-Emotions

In times of intensification of climate change, climate backlash and growing affective polarization, this paper seeks to empirically document two inter-related phenomena: the question of the kind of governing system which would be best suited to address climate and ecological issues on the one hand, and the emerging phenomenon of climate-emotions on the other. It advances the argument that far from being distinct, there is a relation between shifting political and democratic preferences to address climate change and the sociological distribution of climate-emotions. Put differently: the types of climate-emotions we feel influence the types of expectations and projections we hold vis-à-vis existing and desired political systems. While existing social science literature has documented the existence of different types of political preferences on climate change – between preferences for participatory, technocratic or even authoritarian systems (Improta & Mannoni 2025; Shen 2025; Willis et al. 2022) in parallel to the recognition of the shortcoming of the representative model (Fesenfeld et al. 2025) – these studies rarely take into account the possible influence of emotions in shaping these attitudes in the first place. Conversely, while the field of climate-emotions has attracted growing scholarly interest in recent years (Neckel & Hasenfratz, 2021; Pihkala, 2022; Brosch 2026), the bulk of this literature still resides with environmental psychology which chronically ignores political and systemic dimensions (Knops & Silberzahn, 2026), such as citizens’ preferences for democratic reforms to address climate change. Based on the analysis of survey data collected among Belgian citizens in April 2025 (N= 1500), our paper seeks to address this gap by documenting: i) the types of preferences that exist among the citizenry when it comes to climate change governance, i) the emotions that are felt and experienced in this context, and ii) the relations between these two dimensions. In doing so, our paper will aim to provide a timely empirical contribution at the crossroads between environmental political theory and the growing interdisciplinary field of climate-emotions, thereby advancing both the affective turn in political science and the politicization of climate-emotions.