Narratives on the Distributional Impact of Climate Policy Can Fuel Populism

Matilda Gettins and Lorenz Meister

DIW Weekly Report, 2025, vol. 15, issue 38/39, 245-252

Abstract: Populist parties use narratives about social injustice to portray climate policy as elite-driven and socially unjust. This study— based on a survey experiment with some 1,600 participants— examines how three common narratives about the costs associated with climate policy affect populist and climate-populist attitudes. The results show that the narrative highlighting the disproportionate burden on low-income households fuels climate-populist attitudes and undermines trust in democracy. This effect is particularly pronounced among women and low-income households as well as eastern German and conservative voter segments. The narrative portraying climate policy as harmful to the German economy, on the other hand, resonates most strongly with right-leaning voters, while the narrative claiming that businesses are failing to take responsibility was found to fuel climate-populist attitudes primarily among male, eastern German, and left-leaning voters. Overall, the impact of narratives depends on a person’s individual circumstances and prior political experiences. Socially just and transparently communicated policies, however, can enhance public support for climate policy and help prevent populist exploitation.

Keywords: populism; climate policy; distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H41 I38 P18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.975572.de/dwr-25-38-1.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwdwr:dwr15-38-1

Access Statistics for this article

DIW Weekly Report is currently edited by Tomaso Duso, Marcel Fratzscher, Peter Haan, Claudia Kemfert, Alexander Kritikos, Alexander Kriwoluzky, Stefan Liebig, Lukas Menkhoff, Karsten Neuhoff, Carsten Schröder, Katharina Wrohlich and Sabine Fiedler

More articles in DIW Weekly Report from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().