The question of how to increase public support for climate action is at the forefront of policy debates in many countries and is becoming increasingly urgent (Dechezleprêtre et al. 2022, Furceri et al. 2021, Douenne and Fabre 2022).Yet, partisan differences in public perceptions about the existence and importance of climate change have been increasing over the past decades. For instance, in 2001, 48% of Republicans and 61% of Democrats in the US believed that the effects of climate change had already begun. Today, only 29% of Republicans share this belief, compared to 82% of Democrats (Saad 2021). These diverging trends are concerning, as they suggest that finding common ground on climate solutions may become increasingly difficult in the future.At the same time, the frequency and severity of climate disasters have been increasing over time (International Panel on Climate Change 2014). Numerous studies have explored the relationship between disaster experience and views on climate change or environmental behaviours; yet, the evidence remains mixed. Some studies find a significant positive impact (Hazlett and Mildenberger 2020, Deryugina 2013, Baccini and Leemann 2020), others a mixed or qualitatively small positive impact (Konisky et al. 2016, Bergquist and Warshaw 2019), and yet others find no effect (Marquart-Pyatt et al. 2014, Carmichael et al. 2017).In a recent paper (Djourelova et al. 2024a), we revisit the evidence by examining how individual beliefs about climate change respond to disaster experiences in the short term, with a particular focus on ideology as a lens through which these experiences are filtered.Ideological differences in the attribution of disasters to climate changeOur analysis proceeds in two steps. First, we conduct online surveys to understand how individuals reason about the causes of disasters and their association with climate change, using Hurricane Ian as a salient case study. Our findings suggest vast ideological differences in the attribution of the hurricane to climate change and, respectively, in the willingness to support climate action (Figure 1). This suggests that the occurrence of the same disaster is interpreted very differently depending on individual ideology. Eliciting second-order beliefs, we also find that individuals are very much aware of these partisan cleavages.Figure 1 Attribution of disasters to climate change: Prolific surveyIdeological differences in the effect of disaster experience on climate change beliefsIn the second and main part of our analysis, we study how individual beliefs on climate change evolve after exposure to a natural disaster. We do so by linking observational data on individual-level views on climate change, expressed in a large electoral survey (the Cooperative Election Study), to the exact timing and location of disasters declared by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.Our empirical strategy leverages variation in the occurrence of natural disasters in time and space
Lun. Dic 23rd, 2024
