Environmental Politics

Bernauer, T., Kachi, A., McGrath, L.F., Sollberger, S. Implicit Versus Explicit Attitudes Towards Climate Policy. Contact: 

Andersen, B., Bernauer, T., Kachi, A. An Experimental Analysis of the ‘Authority – Legitimacy’ Link in Global Governance. In revise and resubmit at Review of International Organizations. Contact: 

Bernauer, T., Prakash, A., McGrath, L.F. Do Fairness vs. Effectiveness Tradeoffs Influence Public Support for Costly Public Goods Provision? Insights from a Survey Experiment on Road Space Rationing in India. In revise and resubmit at Regulation and Governance. Contact: 

Bakaki, Z., Bernauer, T. (2018). Do Economic Conditions Affect Public Support for Environmental Policy? In conditional accept status at Journal of Cleaner Production. Contact: 

Fesenfeld, L.P., Schmidt, T., Schrode A. (2018). Increasing the role of short-lived climate pollutants in national and international climate policy. In review status at Nature Climate Change. Contact:

Fesenfeld, L.P., Rinscheid, A. Today or Tomorrow: Psychological Distance and Discounting of Climate Change. Contact: 

Fesenfeld, L.P., Policy design matters - the impact of policy packaging on public opinion: A review article. Contact:

Huber, R. A., Fesenfeld, L.P., Bernauer, T., Populism, Responsiveness and Support for Climate Policies. Evidence from a Survey Experiment. Contact:

Huber, R. A., Anderson, B., Bernauer, T. Can Social Norm Interventions Promote Voluntary Pro Environmental Action? In revise and resubmit at Environmental Science and Policy. Contact: 

Huber, R. A. My Enemy’s Friend is My Enemy: The Effect of Populist Attitudes on Climate Scepticism and Support for Environmental Protection. Under review at West European Politics. Contact:

Huber, R. A., Wicki, M. L., Bernauer, T. Disentangling Public Support The Role of Perceived Effectiveness, Fairness and Intrusiveness in Explaining Public Support for Transportation Policies. Contact:

Wicki, M. L., Huber, R. A., Bernauer, T. The Role of Policy Packaging in Explaining Public Acceptability for Transportation Policies. Contact:

Huber, R. A., McGrath, L.F. Assessing the Relative Importance of Psychological and Demographic Factors For Predicting Climate and Environmental Attitudes. In revise and resubmit at Climate Change Letters. Contact: 

McGrath, L.F., Bernauer L.F. Towards a Logic of Appropriateness in Global Climate Policy? Insights from Survey Experiments in China and the United States. Under Review at Journal of Politics. Contact:

Bernauer T, McGrath, L.F., Prakash, A. Framing Policy Choices for Addressing Air Pollution in Delhi and Beijing: A Conjoint and Survey Experiment. Contact:

McGrath, L.F., Bernauer, T. International Environmental Agreements in the Face of Defection: Evidence from Survey Experiments in China and the USA, Contact:

Bernauer,T.,McGrath, L.F. Creating a Winning Coalition through Carbon Taxation? Contact:

McGrath, L.F., Bernauer, T.  Social Desirability Bias in Measures of Climate Skepticism. Contact: 

Authors: Pechar, E., Bernauer, T., and Mayer, F. (2018). Article published in external page Science Communication

Emily Pechar, together with Thomas Bernauer and Frederick Mayer, published a paper titled 'Beyond Political Ideology: The Impact of Attitudes Towards Government and Corporations on Trust in Science'. It aims to shed light onto how attitudes towards governments and corporations help predicting trust in science.

Understanding public distrust of science is both theoretically and practically important. While previous research has focused on the association between political ideology and trust in science, it is at best an inconsistent predictor. This study demonstrates that two dimensions of political ideology—attitudes towards governments and corporations—can more precisely predict trust in science across issues. Using a survey in the United States and Germany on the science of climate change and genetically modified foods, the authors find that an individual’s trust in science varies across issues and that attitudes towards government and corporations are important predictors of this trust.

Authors Anderson, B., Böhmelt, T., and Ward, H. (2017). Article published in external page Environmental Research Letters

This article studies how public opinion is associated with the introduction of renewable energy policies in Europe. While research increasingly seeks to model the link between public opinion and environmental policies, the empirical evidence is largely based on a single case: the US. This limits the generalizability of findings and the authors argue accordingly for a systematic, quantitative study of how public opinion drives environmental policies in another context. Theoretically, they combine arguments behind the political survival of democratic leaders with electoral success and environmental politics. Ultimately, they suggest that office-seeking leaders introduce policies that seem favorable to the domestic audience; if the public prefers environmental protection, the government introduces such policies in turn. The main contribution of this research is the cross-country empirical analysis, where the researchers combine data on the public's environmental attitudes and renewable energy policy outputs in a European context between 1974 and 2015. They show that as public opinion shifts towards prioritizing the environment, there is a significant and positive effect on the rate of renewable energy policy outputs by governments in Europe. To the scientists' knowledge, this is the first systematic, quantitative study of public opinion and environmental policies across a large set of countries, and they demonstrate that the mechanisms behind the introduction of renewable energy policies follow major trends across European states.

Authors: Anderson, B., Böhmelt, T., and Ward, H. (2017). Article published in external page Environmental Research Letters

Brilé Anderson, Tobias Böhmelt, and Hugh Ward present the first quantitative, cross-country analysis on how public opinion is driving environmental policies in Europe, which was published in the Environmental Research Letters.

The relationship between public opinion and renewable energy policies is mostly analyzed theoretically, and existing empirical approaches focus on the US. Brilé Anderson, Tobias Böhmelt, and Hugh Ward contribute to the literature by performing the first quantitative, cross-country analysis for Europe between 1974 and 2015. They base their article on the theoretical assumption that office-seeking democratic leaders introduce policies which are favorable to the domestic audience. If the public is in favor of environmental policies, the government implements them in turn. Hence, the link connecting the public opinion and renewable energy policies is based on the mechanisms of political survival of the democratic leaders and of electoral success. The authors show a trend in public opinion towards prioritizing environment, which leads to a siginificant and positive output of renewable energy policies by European governments.

Authors: Bakaki, Z., and Bernauer, T. (2017). Article published in external page Climatic Change

To what extent citizens are willing not only to support ambitious climate policy but also willing to pay for such policy remains subject to debate. Our analysis addresses three issues in this regard: whether, as is widely assumed but not empirically established, willingness to support (WTS) is higher than willingness to pay (WTP); whether the determinants of the two are similar; and what accounts for within-subject similarity between WTS and WTP. We address these issues based on data from an original nationally representative survey (N = 2500) on forest conservation in Brazil, arguably the key climate policy issue in the country. The findings reveal that WTP is much lower than WTS. The determinants differ to some extent as well, regarding the effects of age, gender, and trust in government. The analysis also provides insights into factors influencing how much WTS and WTP line up within individuals, with respect to age, education, political ideology, salience of the deforestation issue, and trust in government. Our findings provide a more nuanced picture of how strong public support for climate change policy is and a starting point for more targeted climate policy communication.

Authors: McGrath, L., and Bernauer, T. (2017). Article published in external page WIREs Climate Change

Conventional wisdom holds that climate change poses a global public goods problem, thus requiring a global solution that reduces greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions worldwide through some form of centralized target setting and burden-sharing arrangement among countries. Yet, the 2015 Paris Agreement has essentially given up on this approach, on which the 1997 Kyoto Protocol was based, and now relies on policies that are adopted unilaterally and voluntarily by individual countries. Since ambitious climate policies are very unlikely to be enacted and effectively implemented without strong public support, research is beginning to explore how strong public support is for unilateral climate policy and what its determinants are. Recent research has developed useful survey instruments to gauge public support for unilateral climate policy. Results from surveys and survey-embedded experiments show that when respondents are confronted with cost implications and free-riding problems associated with unilateral climate policy, public support tends to drop to some extent, but still remains quite high. Current research thus shows that people are—the hitherto strong global public goods framing of climate policy notwithstanding— surprisingly nonreciprocal in their climate policy preferences. Preferences concerning climate policy tend to be driven primarily by a range of personal predispositions and cost considerations, which existing research has already explored quite extensively, rather than by considerations of what other countries do.

Authors: Anderson, B., Bernauer, T. and Baletti, S. (2017). Article published in external page Climatic Change

Despite the shift from multilateral negotiations on legally binding mitigation commitments to the decentralized nonbinding Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) approach in global climate policy, governments and other stakeholders continue to insist that fairness principles guide the overall effort. Key recurring principles in this debate are capacity and historical responsibility. To keep global warming within the internationally agreed 2 °C limit, many countries will have to engage in more ambitious climate policies relative to current INDCs. Public support will be crucial in this respect. We thus explore the implications of different fairness principles for citizens’ preferences concerning burden sharing in climate policy. To this end, we implemented an online experiment in which participants (N = 414) played an ultimatum game. Participants were tasked with sharing the costs of climate change mitigation. The aim was to examine how participants’ willingness to pay for mitigation was influenced by capacity and historical responsibility considerations. The results show that fairness principles do have a strong effect and that participants applied fairness principles differently depending on their position at the outset. It turns out that participants paid more attention to other players’ capacity and historical responsibility when proposing a particular cost allocation and more attention to their own capacity and responsibility when responding to proposals by others. These and other findings suggest that framing climate policy in terms of internationally coordinated unilateral measures is likely to garner more public support than framing climate policy in terms of a global bargaining effort over the mitigation burden.

Authors: Sollberger, S., Bernauer, T. and Ehlert, U. (2017). Article published in external page Journal of Environmental Psychology

Attentional engagement with climate change is an important precondition for intentional climate-friendly behavior. However, not much is known about the determinants of an individuals' implicit willingness to attend to this global problem. This study investigates two potentially relevant predictors of implicit attention to climate change: a) pro-environmental orientation as a trait factor and b) experimentally induced stress as a state factor. We expected positive effects of pro-environmental orientation and negative effects of stress.

Seventy-one male participants with either high or low pro-environmental orientation were randomly assigned to a stress or control condition. Afterwards, they viewed a series of climate change images and negative control images, which were presented simultaneously with positive and neutral distractors. Attentional deployment to the different stimulus categories was assessed using eye-tracking technology.

Participants with high pro-environmental orientation spent more time looking at climate change as well as other negative images, compared to participants with low pro-environmental orientation. This result suggests that pro-environmental individuals might be characterized by a general propensity to attend to negative information. Furthermore, stress reduced attentional deployment to both climate change and negative control images, which might indicate decreased interest in self-transcendent problems and/or increased efforts of emotion regulation under stress. In summary, these findings constitute first evidence for trait and state predictors of attentional engagement with climate change.

Authors: Anderson, B.; Bernauer, T. and Kachi, A.

Does shifting authority from the domestic to the global level result in an authority-legitimacy gap? It is a common belief that the growing authority of global governance institutions comes at the expense of legitimacy either because citizens oppose this authority transfer or are incapable of understanding its implications. We shed light on these questions using population-based survey experiments in Germany and the United States (N=1600 each). The empirical context is climate change, which is a paradigmatic and costly global governance effort. The results challenge the notion of an authority-legitimacy gap. Citizens appear capable of evaluating the implications of changes in the authority of global governance institutions. However, nuanced expansions in authority, such as changes in international decision rules and domestic implementation procedures, insignificantly affect citizens’ legitimacy beliefs. Rather, legitimacy beliefs appear to be shaped by individuals’ general perceptions of the procedures and performances of global governance efforts. The evidence suggests that there is room to enhance the authority of global governance institutions without risking a legitimacy backlash.

Authors: Bernauer, T., Dong, L., McGrath, L. and Zhang, H. (2016). Article published in external page Politics and Governance

The traditional political economy account of global climate change governance directs our attention to fundamental collective action problems associated with global public goods provision, resulting from positive or negative externalities as well as freeriding. The governance architecture of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol uses the traditional approaches of international diplomacy for addressing such challenges: legally binding commitments based on principles of reciprocity and (fair) cost/burden sharing via formalized carbon-budgeting. Yet, the 2015 Paris Agreement has essentially abandoned this approach, as it now operates on the basis of internationally coordinated and monitored unilateralism. On the presumption that public opinion matters for government policy, we examine how citizens view this shift in climate policy from reciprocity to unilateralism, after many years of exposure to strong reciprocity rhetoric by governments and stakeholders. To that end, we fielded a survey experiment in China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter. The results show that there is, perhaps surprisingly, strong and robust public support for unilateral, non-reciprocal climate policy. To the extent China is interested in pushing ahead with ambitious and thus costly GHG reduction policies, our results suggest that China can leverage segments of public support in order to overcome domestic obstacles to GHG mitigation policies.

Authors: Bakaki, Z. and Bernauer, T. (2016). Article published in external page Environmental Research Letters

Recent research suggests that there is substantial public support (including willingness to pay) for forest conservation. Based on a nationwide survey experiment in Brazil (N=2,500) the largest and richest of the world’s tropical developing countries, we shed new light on this issue. To what extent does the public in fact support forest conservation and what factors are influencing support levels? Unlike previous studies, our results show that the willingness to pay for tropical forest conservation in Brazil is rather low. Moreover, framing forest conservation in terms of biodiversity protection, which tends to create more local benefits, does not induce more support than framing conservation in terms of mitigating global climate change. The results also show that low levels of trust in public institutions have a strong negative impact on the public’s willingness to pay for forest conservation, individually and/or via government spending. What could other (richer) countries do, in this context, to encourage forest conservation in Brazil and other tropical developing countries? One key issue is whether prospects of foreign funding for forest conservation are likely to crowd out or, conversely, enhance the motivation for domestic level conservation efforts. We find that prospects of foreign funding have no significant effect on willingness to pay for forest conservation. These findings have at least three policy implications, namely, that the Brazilian public’s willingness to pay for forest conservation is very limited, that large-scale international funding is probably needed, and that such funding is unlikely to encourage more domestic effort, but is also unlikely to crowd out domestic efforts. Restoring public trust in the Brazilian government is key to increasing public support for forest conservation in Brazil.

Authors: Bakaki, Z. and Bernauer, T. (2016). Article published in external page Environmental Politics.

A survey-embedded experiment implemented around the time of the 2014 annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (N ≈ 1200) examined whether such summits are able to increase citizens’ awareness of climate problems. This study finds that exposure to positive or negative cues about the COP increases climate change awareness, particularly among participants who start out with a low level of awareness. Neither positive nor negative cues about the COP significantly affect people’s policy preferences. Our finding resonates with Bernard Cohen’s observation that the mass media may not often be successful in telling people what to think, but they are successful in telling readers what to think about.

Author: Gampfer, R. (2016). Article published in external page Global Environmental Politics

Climate clubs, or “minilateralism,” are increasingly advocated as a way to move global climate governance forward. Minilateralism supposedly carries structural advantages that facilitate effective climate governance. Some have cautioned, however, that climate clubs lack political legitimacy, commanding little domestic public support. Consequently, small coalitions might not always be politically feasible, even if they could deliver substantial mitigation. Design features like the emission share regulated, commitment structure, club goods, and sanctions against nonmembers could help mitigate this deficit. Gampfer reports results from conjoint experiments testing these propositions that were conducted with nationally representative samples in the United States and India. The findings indicate that minilateral approaches per se tend to receive low public support, but that support can be increased by certain configurations of design elements, especially through a combination of club goods for members and sanctions against nonmember countries. Climate clubs therefore need careful institutional design to be politically feasible.

Authors: Bernauer, T., Gampfer, R., Meng, T., and Su, Y-S. (2016). Article published in external page Global Environmental Change

Governments need the support of their citizens in order to be able to adopt and implement ambitious environmental protection policies. Recent research on liberal democratic systems has found evidence that increased civil society organization involvement can help increase the popular legitimacy of (that is, public support for) such policy-making. We are interested in whether this finding is also relevant to other types of political systems. To find out we implemented a survey experiment in China (N=932). The empirical focus is on climate policy, a paradigmatic global governance effort, in which China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, plays a key role. The results show that people welcome the involvement of civil society actors – with the exception of business civil society organizations – in climate policy-making, though most participants in our survey experiment did not favor civil society organizations over government agencies. They also show, however, that moving from non-inclusion to inclusion of civil society organizations improves people’s assessment of transparency and representational quality of climate governance (two key facets of input or procedural legitimacy) by 14 and 24 percent respectively. Our findings suggest that – even though few civil society organizations are currently independent from government in China – increased civil society organizations involvement in climate policy-making could contribute to enhancing public support for climate policy. In view of great challenges China faces in implementing its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) within the Paris Agreement framework, its climate policy could thus benefit from greater involvement of civil society organizations.

Authors: Anderson, B., and Bernauer, T. (2016). Article published in external page Energy Policy

A fundamental policy design choice in government-led climate change mitigation is: what role should flexibility mechanisms like carbon offsetting play in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Since public opinion affects the policy choices of government, we investigate how arguments regarding carbon offsetting's economic efficiency, effectiveness, and ethicality, which have been key points in the public debate, impact the public's preferences. We fielded an online framing experiment in the United States (N=995) to empirically identify how arguments for and against carbon offsetting influence public preferences for the inclusion of offsetting in national GHG mitigation policy. We find that the public's support for international offsetting increases and support for reductions at their source (i.e. within firms' own operations) diminishes when considerations of economic efficiency gains are at the forefront. Support for offsetting declines when individuals are confronted with arguments concerning its effectiveness and ethicality, which suggests that future policies will require clear standards of additionality in order to address these concerns. Moreover, we find that how carbon offsetting is framed matters even amongst climate skeptics and support could potentially be enhanced via improved communication on efficiency gains.

Authors: Bernauer, T., and McGrath, L. (2016). Article published in external page Nature Climate Change

Ambitious policies for limiting climate change require strong public support. However, the public’s appetite for such policies, as observed in most countries, is rather limited. One possibility for enhancing public support could be to shift the main justification in the public policy discourse on greenhouse gas mitigation from benefits of reducing climate change risks (the conventional justification) to other types of benefit. Technological innovation, green jobs, community building and health benefits are widely discussed candidates. The intuition is that reframing greenhouse gas mitigation efforts and their benefits in such terms could make them more personally relevant as well as more emotionally engaging and appealing to citizens. On the basis of results from two survey-embedded experiments (combined N = 1,675), and in contrast to some earlier studies, we conclude that simple reframing of climate policy is unlikely to increase public support, and outline reasons for this finding. As the added value of other justifications remains unclear at best and potentially nil, sticking to climate risk reduction as the dominant justification seems worthwhile.

Authors: Sollberger, S., Bernauer, T., and Ehlert, U. (2016). Article published in external page Social Neuroscience

Recently, cortisol has been suggested to moderate the positive relationship between testosterone and antisocial behavior. More precisely, high testosterone levels have been found to be related to aggressive or dominant behavior especially when cortisol levels were low. In the present study, we aimed to extend these findings to pro-environmental behavior as an indicator of prosocial behavior. In a first step, 147 male participants provided information on their everyday pro-environmental behavior by completing an online questionnaire on various energy-saving behaviors. In a second step, subjects provided two saliva samples for the assessment of testosterone and cortisol on two subsequent mornings after awakening. We found that testosterone was negatively related to pro-environmental behavior, but only in men with low cortisol. In conclusion, our findings provide first evidence for the joint association of testosterone and cortisol with everyday pro-environmental behavior. These results further reinforce the importance of considering interdependent hormone systems simultaneously rather than focusing on a single hormone.

Authors: Sollberger, S., Bernauer, T., Ehlert, U. (2016). Article published in external page Psychoneuroendocrinology

Stress has been found to have both positive and negative effects on prosocial behavior, suggesting the involvement of moderating factors such as context and underlying motives. In the present study, we investigated the conditions under which acute stress leads to an increase vs. decrease in environmental donation behavior as an indicator of prosocial behavior. In particular, we examined whether the effects of stress depended on preexisting pro-environmental orientation and stage of the donation decision (whether or not to donate vs. the amount to be donated). Male participants with either high (N = 40) or low (N  = 39) pro-environmental orientation were randomly assigned to a social stress test or a control condition. Salivary cortisol was assessed repeatedly before and after stress induction. At the end of the experiment, all subjects were presented with an opportunity to donate a portion of their monetary compensation to a climate protection foundation.

We found that stress significantly increased donation frequency, but only in subjects with low pro-environmental orientation. Congruously, their decision to donate was positively associated with cortisol response to the stress test and the emotion regulation strategy mood repair, as well as accompanied by an increase in subjective calmness. In contrast, among the participants who decided to donate, stress significantly reduced the donated amount of money, regardless of pro-environmental orientation. In conclusion, our findings suggest that acute stress might generally activate more self-serving motivations, such as making oneself feel better and securing one’s own material interests. Importantly, however, a strong pro-environmental orientation partially prevented these effects.

Authors: Bernauer, T., and Gampfer, R. (2015). Article published in external page Environmental Science & Policy

Most governments emphasize the need for reciprocal (“give and take”) international commitments in global climate policy. Nonetheless, existing public opinion polls indicate strong support by individual citizens for unilateral climate policies as well. This raises the question of whether governments could, without risking electoral punishment, afford to pursue more ambitious unilateral climate policies, or whether surveys may have overestimated support for unilateralism due to measurement problems. Based on conjoint and framing experiments embedded in representative surveys in the world's two largest democracies, India and the United States, we engage in a critical re-assessment of earlier survey results. We find robust public support for unilateral climate policy in both countries. Such support declines with increasing costs and increases with growing co-benefits and problem solving effectiveness. We also find, however, that policy conditionality and possible institutional design mechanisms against free-riding by other states (which make the policy “less unilateral” by providing for reciprocation) play no significant role when citizens form their preferences with respect to climate policy. Neither is public support affected by whether policies focus on adaptation (which limits benefits to the investing country) or mitigation (which benefits all countries globally). Overall, these findings suggest that, in view of very slow progress in global climate policy, governments of rich and poor countries could politically afford to push ahead with more ambitious unilateral climate policies.

Authors: Kachi, A., Bernauer, T., and Gampfer, R. (2015). Article published in external page Ecological Economics

Conventional wisdom holds that the state of the economy has a strong impact on citizens' appetite for environmental policies, including climate policy. Assuming median voter preferences prevail, periods of economic prosperity are likely to be conducive, and economic downturns are likely to be detrimental to ambitious climate policy. Using original surveys in the United States and Germany, we engage in a critical re-assessment of this claim. The results show that, for the most part, individuals' perceptions of their own economic situations have no significant effect on their policy support. Negative perceptions of the national economic outlook reduce support for climate policy in the US, but not in Germany. However, the magnitude of this national economy effect in the US is small. On the other hand, individuals' climate risk perceptions consistently have a statistically significant and large effect across various model specifications, and interestingly, this pattern holds for the US, whose government is among the less ambitious in global climate policy, as well as Germany, which is among the frontrunners. Our study indicates that the state of the economy may not trump climate risk considerations as conventional wisdom claims.

Author: Gampfer, R. (2014). Article published in external page Climatic Change

Fairness principles play a large role in negotiations on mitigation burden sharing. Do these fairness principles affect individual preferences for burden sharing? I examine whether normative criteria influence individual burden sharing preferences. This bottom-up perspective is important for two reasons. First, it is unknown if governments’ fairness rhetoric matches citizens’ actual preferences. Second, international climate agreements directly affect individuals through domestic policy measures (e.g. energy taxes), and therefore require domestic public support for successful implementation. I conducted two laboratory experiments where participants have to agree on how to share climate change mitigation costs in an ultimatum game. Treatment conditions include differences between proposer and responder in capacity, vulnerability (experiment 1), and historical emissions (experiment 2). Historical emissions are endogenously determined in a prior game. Capacity inequality strongly affects burden sharing, with richer players ending up paying more, and poor players less. Vulnerability differences reduce the influence of fairness, leading to suggested cost distributions more unfavorable to vulnerable players. However, vulnerable responders still reject many “unfair” offers. Differences in historical responsibility result in cost distributions strongly correlated with players’ relative contributions to climate change. The results suggest that more nuanced consideration of fairness criteria in burden sharing could make ambitious climate agreements more acceptable for reluctant countries and their citizens.

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Author: Gampfer, R., Bernauer, T., and Kachi, A. (2014). Article published in external page Global Environmental Change

The adoption of the Warsaw mechanism on loss and damage has again highlighted the North-South divide in those parts of UNFCCC negotiations dealing with international climate finance. Current estimates put required funding from rich countries at 50 to 100 billion Euros per year to induce non-Annex I countries to take on greenhouse gas limitation commitments and to assist highly vulnerable countries. Results from survey-embedded conjoint experiments can help policy-makers anticipate opportunities and pitfalls in designing large-scale climate funding schemes. We implemented such experiments in the United States and Germany to better understand what institutional design characteristics are likely to garner more public support for climate funding among citizens in key developed countries. We find that climate funding receives more public support if it flows to efficient governments, funding decisions are made jointly by donor and recipient countries, funding is used both for mitigation and adaptation, and other donor countries contribute a large share. Contrary to what one might expect, climate change damage levels, income, and emissions in/of potential recipient countries have no significant effect on public support. These findings suggest that finance mechanisms that focus purely on compensating developing countries, without contributing to the global public good of mitigation, will find it hard to garner public support.

Author: Bernauer, T. (2013). Article published in external page Annual Review of Political Science

Within the past 25 years, climate change has evolved from an issue of interest primarily to some natural scientists into one of the top priorities on the global policy agenda. Research in political science and related fields offers systematic and empirically well-supported explanations for why solving the climate problem has turned out to be more difficult than originally anticipated. After reviewing this research, the author focuses on four areas in which we know less: (a) institutional design features that may help in mitigating or overcoming fundamental problems in the global cooperative effort; (b) factors that are driving variation in climate policies at national and subnational levels; (c) driving forces of climate policy beyond the state, in particular civil society, the science–policy interface, and public opinion; and (d) sociopolitical consequences of failing to avoid major climatic changes. The article concludes by identifying key questions at the micro, meso, and macro levels that should be addressed by political scientists in the coming years. In view of the fact that governance efforts at the global level are progressing very slowly, greater attention to bottom-up dynamics appears useful, both for analytical reasons (there is lots of variation to be explained) and for normative reasons.

Authors: Bernauer, T., and Gampfer, R. (2013). Article published in external page Global Environmental Change

Does civil society involvement enhance public support for global climate governance? If so, how? Many academics and policy-makers claim that public involvement in global climate governance increases transparency, strengthens representation of otherwise marginalized stakeholders, and provides knowledge to enhance problem-solving capacity. Skeptics challenge this claim, noting that civil society organizations are not accountable to voters and often represent narrowly defined interests. We evaluate the two competing claims by examining how civil society involvement affects public support for global environmental governance with a series of survey experiments. Overall, our results speak in favor of civil society involvement. While individuals view civil society participation favorably in general, civil society inclusion, conceptualized as a static condition, does not appear to increase popular legitimacy of global climate governance. We also find, however, that changing existing practices of civil society inclusion induces substantial changes people’s evaluations of climate policy. The latter finding has important implications for current debates on how to address the persistent stalemate in global climate negotiations.


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Summary of findings in EU Commission Newsletter: Download PDF (PDF, 230 KB)

Authors: Bernauer, T., Gampfer, R., and Kachi, A. (2013). Article published in external page European Union Politics

How do climate policies unilaterally introduced by "frontrunner" countries influence public support in countries that did not vote on the policies but are affected by the new scheme? Global climate change governance is characterized by strong interest heterogeneity across countries over how to allocate the global mitigation burden. As in other cases of global collective goods provision, unilateral measures by frontrunners are an important strategy for avoiding stalemate and failure of problem solving under such conditions. Such unilateralism usually results in some involuntary burden sharing by third countries. We examine the effect of a major unilateral EU climate policy initiative, which regulates emissions from aircraft, on public opinion in the two largest democracies outside the EU, India and the USA. Based on survey experiments, we study the effects of cost and sovereignty considerations on people’s evaluation of the EU’s new policy. The results show that, despite much government rhetoric about costs and sovereignty violation, both types of concern have a modest impact. They suggest that there remains some room for the EU in pursuing even such unilateral climate policies that involuntarily enlist other countries in sharing the global mitigation burden.

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