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We shed new light on a long-standing question in political science: When confronted with costly policy choices, do citizens form their preferences using material (economic) concerns or other-regarding motivations, such as the distribution of costs, and how are these moderated by political ideology? Using the case of carbon taxation, a widely advocated policy solution to climate change, we conducted survey experiments in Germany and the United States to assess the relative importance of these forms of preferences. The results show that individuals are primarily concerned with how a carbon tax would affect their individual income. There are also important cross-national differences with high-income German respondents being more receptive to redistributive policy design, especially in contrast to high-income Democrats who significantly decrease support for carbon taxation. These findings highlight how the constituencies generated by new policies can significantly alter the distribution of mass support for action on emerging societal problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strong public support is a prerequisite for ambitious and thus costly climate change mitigation policy, and strong public concern over climate change is a prerequisite for policy support. Why, then, do most public opinion surveys indicate rather high levels of concern and rather strong policy support, while de facto mitigation efforts in most countries remain far from ambitious? One possibility is that survey measures for public concern fail to fully reveal the true attitudes of citizens due to social desirability bias. In this paper, we implemented list-experiments in representative surveys in Germany and the United States (N = 3620 and 3640 respectively) to assess such potential bias. We find evidence that people systematically misreport, that is, understate their disbelief in human caused climate change. This misreporting is particularly strong amongst politically relevant subgroups. Individuals in the top 20% of the income distribution in the United States and supporters of conservative parties in Germany exhibit significantly higher climate change skepticism according to the list experiment, relative to conventional measures. While this does not definitively mean that climate skepticism is a widespread phenomenon in these countries, it does suggest that future research should reconsider how climate change concern is measured, and what subgroups of the population are more susceptible to misreporting and why. Our findings imply that public support for ambitious climate policy may be weaker than existing survey research suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we seek to identify robust predictors of individuals’ attitudes towards climate change and environmental degradation. While much of the extant literature has been devoted to the individual explanatory potential of individuals’ characteristics, we focus on the extent to which these characteristics provide robust predictions of climate and environmental attitudes. Thereby, we adjudicate the relative predictive power of psychological and sociodemographic characteristics, as well as the predictive power of combinations of these attributes. To do so, we use a popular machine learning technique, Random Forests, on three surveys fielded in China, Switzerland, and the USA, using a variety of outcome variables. We find that a psychological construct, the consideration of future consequences (CFC) scale, performs well in predicting attitudes, across all contexts and better than traditional explanations of climate attitudes, such as income and education. Given recent advances suggesting potential psychological barriers of behavioural change Public (Weaver, Adm Rev 75:806-816, 2015) and the use of psychological constructs to target persuasive messages (Abrahamse et al., J Environ Psychol 265-276, 2007; Hirsh et al., Psychol Sci 23:578-581, 2012), identifying important predictors, such as the CFC may allow to better understand public’s appetite for climate and environmental policies and increase demand for these policies, in an area where existing efforts have shown to be lacking (Bernauer and McGrath, Nat Clim Chang 6:680-683, 2016; Chapman et al., Nat Clim Chang 7:850-852, 2017). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]