Beliefs about consequences from climate action under weak climate institutions : sectors, home bias, and international embeddedness
Bayer, Patrick and Genovese, Federica (2020) Beliefs about consequences from climate action under weak climate institutions : sectors, home bias, and international embeddedness. Global Environmental Politics, 20 (4). pp. 28-50. ISSN 1526-3800 (https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00577)
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Abstract
Climate policy has distributional effects, and ratcheting up climate ambition will only become politically feasible if the general public believes that their country can win from ambitious climate action. In this article, we develop a theory of belief formation that anchors distributional effects from climate action at the sector level. Specifically, we study how knowing about these impacts shapes public beliefs about collective economic consequences from climate policy—not only in a home country but also abroad. A nationally representative survey experiment in the United Kingdom demonstrates that respondents are biased toward their home country in assessing information about winning and losing sectors: while beliefs brighten for good news and worsen for bad news when the home country is involved, distributional effects from abroad are discounted for belief formation. We also show that feelings of “international embeddedness,” akin to globalization attitudes, make UK respondents consistently hold more positive beliefs that the country can benefit from ambitious climate action. Ruling out several alternative explanations, these results offer a first step toward a better understanding of how distributional effects in one issue area, such as globalization, can spill over to other issue areas, such as climate change.
ORCID iDs
Bayer, Patrick ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1731-1270 and Genovese, Federica;-
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Item type: Article ID code: 73458 Dates: DateEvent1 November 2020Published23 October 2020Published Online14 July 2020AcceptedSubjects: Political Science > International relations Department: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS) > Government and Public Policy > Politics Depositing user: Pure Administrator Date deposited: 05 Aug 2020 02:52 Last modified: 06 Nov 2024 01:50 Related URLs: URI: https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/73458