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 project we study how the public positions itself towards ambitious climate policy not only in a home country but also abroad. We claim that the distributional effects that home and foreign climate policy will have on domestic economic actors will shape the public perception of ambitious climate action. Additionally, we argue that the magnitude of these effects varies as a function of “international embeddedness,” akin to globalization attitudes. We present evidence of our theory with nationally representative survey data collected in 2019 for the United Kingdom, leveraging the increasing relevance of climate leadership and Brexit in the public domain. We further discuss extensions to our argument and ongoing empirical investigation.
Federica Genovese is Senior Lecturer, Department of Government, University of Essex. She previously was as a postdoctoral fellow and the Eastern Academic Research Consortium (Eastern ARC) Lead for the Quantitative Social Sciences, University of Essex. She has a PhD in political science from University of Konstanz, an MA from SAIS Johns Hopkins University and a BA from University of Toronto. Her research focuses on international organizations and international political economy, with particular attention to environmental policy, economic interdependence and international crises.
Patrick Bayer is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Chancellor’s Fellow in Energy Policy at the University of Strathclyde. He is also a Fellow at the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy (ISEP), Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and Associated Researcher at the Centre for the Political Economy of Reforms at the University of Mannheim. His research focuses on central questions in international cooperation and the political economy of environmental and energy politics. He is particularly interested in understanding the relationship between domestic and international politics. Current projects include formal and quantitative work on multilateral agreements, government-firm interaction in carbon markets, and international climate pledges.
Chris Anderson is Professor in Politics and Policy at LSE European Institute.