In this interview, Håkon Grøn Sælen discusses the research and findings of his recent article in Environmental Politics, co-authored with Aaron M. McCright: What explains the relationship between populist radical right attitudes and opposition to climate policy?: structural vs. ideological factors.
Congratulations on your recent article! What is the key message that you hope people take from this research?
Thank you! We see more and more examples of populist radical right parties and politicians opposing climate policy. Previous work has found a correlation between populist radical right attitudes and climate policy opposition also among voters. Our work highlights the importance of nativist ideology for understanding this association.
What did you find in your exploration of the links between support for the Populist Radical Right and resistance to climate politics?
We test two alternative explanations presented in the literature. A structuralist explanation argues that the link is spurious, as both climate policy opposition and radical right attitudes are caused by perceived vulnerability to structural changes in the economy. The second explanation focuses on the ideological content of populism of the radical right, and how this is at odds with climate policy. It posits that any apparent effect of structural changes on climate policy attitudes is mediated by radical right populist ideology.
We designed a survey to test these two explanations against each other, and administered it in Australia, Germany, Norway, and the United States. Two separate analyses both support the ideological explanation over the structuralist explanation. The first analysis finds that vulnerability to structural changes in the economy has a weak effect on climate policy opposition, and that this effect is largely mediated by populist radical right attitudes. The second analysis shows that the relationship between radical right attitudes and climate policy opposition is mediated more by ideological arguments than concern about the structural impacts of climate change. The strongest link is through rejection of transnational responsibility for climate change impacts, reinforced by fear that international cooperation on climate change undermines national sovereignty.
In the analysis, we disentangle populist radical right attitudes into populism and nativism. Another central finding is that nativism (an exclusionary form of nationalism) is consistently more important than populism for explaining opposition to climate policy.
You spoke to people in Australia, Germany, Norway, and the USA. Were there any differences in what you found between these countries?
The ideological explanation fits best across all countries. A nuance is that in Norway, employment in fossil fuel production is more important as a driver of climate policy opposition than in the other countries, and this effect is not mediated by populist radical right attitudes. In that sense, the structuralist explanation performs better in Norway than in the other countries.
Nativism also has a stronger connection with climate policy opposition than populism has across all countries, and the strength of this connection does not vary much. For populism, the connection is strongest in Germany and Norway, while weakest in the USA.
There are also some far right actors who support climate policies, or their own versions of climate action. Did you find any evidence of this support / relationship?
Good point – previous research has found, for example, that populist radical right parties in Austria (FPÖ) and Italy (Lega) try to reclaim climate change concern as an element of nationalism. Further out on the extreme right, there are also some fringe groups labelled eco-fascists. We do not find any evidence for such a link between nativism and climate policy support on the population level. In contrast, we do find one indication of a populist version of climate policy support. While the overall effect of populism is more climate policy opposition, when we strip away concern about negative structural effects of climate policy and common arguments derived from populist radical right ideology, populism is associated with climate policy support through some other mechanism. This could indicate the existence of ‘green populism’, which might be mediated by, for example, anti-capitalism. More work is needed to understand this link.
Finally, what’s next? Are you publishing more on this topic?
This article is an output from the project titled POPCLIM: Right-wing populism and the political feasibility of climate policy. We are currently working case studies of populist radical right parties and politicians in Australia, Germany, Norway and the USA; as well as further analyses of the survey data.
Bio: Håkon Grøn Sælen is a senior researcher at CICERO Center for International Climate Research, Oslo, Norway. His publications cover a range of topics within the realm of climate policy; including public attitudes to climate policy, populism of the radical right, fairness perceptions in international climate negotiations, explaining cross-country variation in climate ambition levels, minilateral climate cooperation (climate clubs), and the Paris Agreement (including the effect of US withdrawal).
