Green backlash and the political consequences of politicizing energy prices | Zackary Dickson

Zackary Dickson is a Fellow in Quantitative Methodology at the Department of Methodology at LSE. Zackary will be presenting the paper Green backlash and the political consequences of politicizing energy prices.

Abstract

Who bears the costs of decarbonization—and who is blamed for such costs—has become a central cleavage in contemporary party competition. Building on research on “green backlash” and the populist radical right (PRR), I argue that sharp and uneven household energy price shocks create fertile ground for PRR entrepreneurs to frame the transition to renewable sources of energy as unfairly costly. I examine the United Kingdom’s 2021–2023 energy price surge and show two linked patterns. First, using a new text measure applied to party communications in press releases and in YouTube videos, I document explicit blame attribution of higher energy bills to Net Zero and climate-related policies. Second, using pre-shock geographic energy price vulnerability measured using administrative data on over 27 million household energy efficiency inspections, I leverage difference-in-differences and triple-differences designs to find that individuals more vulnerable to higher energy prices become more likely to support PRR parties. Further evidence using survey panel data suggests that voters indeed blamed the government’s environmental policies instead of the economy, implying that political support for a green transition hinges on insulating the most vulnerable households.

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