REACCT Research and Analysis on Climate Change Public Opinion Trends

The topic of climate change has recently captured the attention of scholars from different disciplines, but studies have mainly focused on citizens’ knowledge on and perception of the climate crisis and determinants related with personal economic costs and civic or moral attitudes. As a result, we still have a limited understanding of the role of identity, institutions or other divisive topics on how individuals form and update their feelings and opinions regarding this issue. How do citizens adjust their knowledge and attitudes towards climate change? Do extreme climate events increase their support to environmental policies? Is increasing familiarity with environmental challenges related to shifts in public attitudes? Does party polarization lead to climate change backlash with increasing denial of the severity of the problem? And if that is the case, is that a temporary backlash or does it have a more structural nature? One of the current empirical limitations to explore these questions is that the majority of works conducted in this area lack a longitudinal approach, which restricts our capacity to explore whether citizens’ attitudes towards climate policymaking change over time and the most important drivers of these changes. This project ECF-provides a better understanding of public opinion attitudes towards climate policymaking in Spain and its evolution over time by conducting an online panel survey. The panel will allows researchers to have a better measurement of citizens’ behavior and a more refined analysis of factors that may account for changes in their knowledge, attitudes, thoughts or feelings. It also facilitates the precise temporal ordering of potential cause and effect. The longitudinal track of public opinion will provide information about the stability of opinions, under what circumstances opinion changes take place and the stability of such changes. Indeed, the panel survey is the best instrument to identify opinion backlashes, their causes, and whether such changes are short-range or structural.

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