The Mass Politics of Climate Change

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Climate change and the policies to respond to it have profound economic, social, and environmental effects on citizens. The mass public’s attitudes, beliefs, and preferences, in turn, shape the incentives of leaders to combat climate change. The papers on this panel explore the mass politics of climate change: What are the electoral effects of green industrial policy? Who in Global South countries receives government help after natural disasters? How can the process facilitating the clean energy transition foster public support? How does economic diversification in response to climate change affect support for authoritarian regimes? These questions canvas the myriad ways citizens influence and are affected by climate policy. The authors leverage diverse methods to answer these questions, including survey and laboratory experiments, measurement from remote sensing satellites, and techniques for identifying cause-and-effect from observational data. The findings will enhance our understanding of the public’s behavior and leaders’ incentives as the world warms.

Sub Unit

• Division 39: Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics

Chair

• Federica Genovese University of Oxford

Discussants

• Patrick J. Egan New York University

• Matto Mildenberger University of California Santa Barbara

Individual Presentations

• Driving Labor Apart: Climate Policy Backlash in the American Auto Corridor - Alexander Foster Gazmararian, Princeton; Lewis Krashinsky, Princeton University

• Unequal Disasters and Uneven Response - Mats Ahrenshop, University of Oxford; Anthony Calacino, University of Oxford; Federica Genovese, University of Oxford; Hayley Pring, University of Oxford

• The Democracy-Decarbonization Dilemma - Fergus Green, University College London; Michele Zadra, University of Southampton

• Oil, Gender Anxiety, and Regime Stability in the Arabian Gulf - Sarah S. Bush, University of Pennsylvania; Amanda Clayton, UC Berkeley; Elizabeth R. Nugent, Princeton University