Economic Insecurity, Greenlash and the Demand for Climate Policies in Europe

ABSTRACT

We study how perceived economic insecurity predicts people's support for climate policies across European regions. By developing a new political economy model and using a dataset with 17 European countries, we show that larger perceived economic insecurity is robustly associated with lower support for climate policies involving higher taxes on pollution. We argue that these results occur because implementing environmental taxes can reduce people's purchasing power by increasing the price of private goods; at the same time, feelings of economic insecurity exacerbate voters' concerns about their future income, propelling them to oppose higher taxes on pollution to protect their economic stability. We also find that voters with ‘pro‐environmental’ attitudes express stronger support for climate policies than those with ‘anti‐environmental’ attitudes; however, ‘pro‐environmental’ voters exhibit a stronger backlash against climate policies (or ‘greenlash’) than ‘anti‐environmental’ voters when they feel economically insecure. We theoretically argue that ‘pro‐environmental’ voters have a stronger incentive to make an about‐face and prioritise their economic concerns over their ideological stance if they feel economically insecure.