Guest post by Sofia Henriks, University of Gothenburg.
Do voters punish their governments for implementing climate policies? According to popular beliefs, yes. But does this actually show up in opinion polls? In our recent paper, ‘Voters do not punish their government for climate policies under favorable conditions’ co-authored with Niklas Harring and Nils Droste, we tried to find out if this idea is true.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has famously stressed the urgent need for rapid and substantial emission reductions to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. Surveys show that EU citizens rank climate change as the single most important issue (in 2021), and 75% of EU citizens believe that their government is not doing enough to address climate change. At the same time, studies argue that politicians are reluctant to introduce stricter climate change mitigation policies because of the risk of not being re-elected due to high short-term costs and long-term benefits.
However, few studies have systematically studied whether or not the introduction of climate change policies actually leads voters to punish incumbent parties. In a recent article in Environmental Politics, I, together with my co-authors Niklas Harring and Nils Droste, use a multi-method design that combines a content analysis of news articles on issue salience and sentiment for each policy, with a temporal regression discontinuity design (RDD) to test for structural breaks in Swedish voter support at the introduction of climate policies.
In this guest blog post, I will present our case and findings. I will begin by discussing why we chose Sweden, followed by a short discussion of voter mobility and support for climate policies. Then, I will present our findings and their implications.
Sweden as a favorable case
We studied the Swedish voter because the country serves as a suitable case when trying to find a country with favorable conditions. There are several reasons for this: First, Sweden ranks in the top ten in the Environmental Index Performance. Second, the country is recognized as a leader in climate policy, and often cited as a success story. For example, the country introduced a carbon tax in 1991 and a binding climate law in 2018.
Third, other societal factors, such as low levels of corruption, high levels of trust, and the fact that citizens express high levels of concern about climate change, made the country suitable for study. Our idea was that if Swedish voters would punish the government for the introduction of climate policies, it would indicate that this would happen even under fairly climate-friendly electoral conditions. Conversely, if voters do not punish the government, this may indicate that at least under favorable conditions, governments can introduce climate policies without losing public approval.
Issue salience, voter support for climate policies, and a much more mobile voter
Voter mobility is increasing, and as a result, voters tend to focus more on a single issue when making their voting choices. This tendency is also present in the Swedish electorate. In the 1950s, 10-15% of voters changed parties between elections, and in the last election about a third changed parties. Thus, voting decisions are now more influenced by issues that are prominent in the public debate than by party loyalty alone. As a result, issue salience has become increasingly important for understanding movements in the political landscape. When voters change their opinions depending on specific policies, this sends a signal to the government about voters’ priorities, making politicians more likely to acknowledge salient issues that are responsive to the electorate.
Finally, much previous research has examined why people do or do not support climate change policies, finding factors such as political orientation, perceived fairness, concern and knowledge about climate change, and trust in institutions to be important.
To summarize, it is more likely for a party to address climate change if its voters see it as a pressing issue, and there is a greater chance that a climate policy that is perceived as fair and effective receives support, but we still see a knowledge gap in the literature regarding how the electorate actually responds to the introduction of climate policies by the government.
Climate policy adoption has limited effect on government support
Across our results, we could not find a consistent effect for any of the policies. However, based on robustness checks, we were able to capture significant effects of a change in the level of government support on other events, but no observable major changes in government support that coincide with the introduction of climate policies in Sweden. Thus, although both the literature and popular belief tell us that governments can expect to be punished when climate policies are introduced, we find no empirical support for such a hypothesis in our study. We can therefore conclude that this is not always the case.
In recent years, there have been examples where introduced climate policies have faced a strong backlash in the form of public protests, such as the Yellow Vest protests, after the introduction of climate taxes in France in 2018. However, there is a risk that these high-profile examples have too much influence on politicians who are afraid to put forward climate policy proposals. In contrast, our study shows that climate policy measures do not always directly lead to lower voter support. For almost twenty years, Swedish governments have apparently not been “punished” by voters when introducing climate policies. However, whether Sweden is a typical case, or whether we are more or less likely to find effects in Sweden, is up for debate.
Bio: Sofia Henriks just started her PhD in political science at the University of Gothenburg. Her main areas of research are in political behavior, support for climate policies, and experimental research designs. Sofia’s work has among others appeared in the journals Ecological Economics and PNAS Nexus, and she contributed a chapter to the book Towards a Sustainable World: Academic Insights and Perspectives.
Twitter: @SofiaHenriks
