The Political Feasibility of Transformative Climate Policy – Public Opinion about Transforming Food and Transport Systems

Abstract

The occurrence of runaway and irreversible climate change is a realistic risk for humankind. The effective mitigation of both long- and short-lived climate pollutants will minimize the risk of crossing climate-tipping points and maximize co-benefits, such as reduced air pollution. Effective mitigation requires a rapid transformation of our societies. Transformative climate policies are key to triggering tipping points in socio-technical systems and accelerating the fundamental redesign of our societies. To effectively mitigate climate change, ambitious transformative policies will not only need to induce rapid technological change, but also alter human behavior through intervening in individuals’ everyday lives – for example, by changing peoples’ food and mobility habits. While such policies can successfully reduce the emission of climate pollutants, they simultaneously make the costs of mitigation visible to citizens. In essence, the open question is if ambitious transformative climate policies are politically feasible. The main objective of this dissertation is therefore to contribute to the growing body of research at the intersection of political economy, political psychology, and transition studies that seeks to identify both effective and feasible climate policies. In particular, the thesis addresses an important research gap with regard to public opinion about socio-technical transformation. Empirically, this dissertation studies the political feasibility of, particularly public opinion about, transformative climate policies in the food and transport systems across three countries, namely, China, Germany, and the United States. Specifically, the thesis focuses on policies that aim at reducing meat consumption and the use of cars that run on fossil fuels. Changing individuals’ meat consumption and car usage are key measures for transforming food and transport systems. The dissertation builds on the premise that public support is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for implementing such ambitious climate policies and making food and transport systems transformations feasible. Specifically, the dissertation investigates to what extent political communication and policy design techniques affect public opinion about ambitious and transformative climate policies in the food and transport system. Theoretically, the thesis builds on and speaks to the debate about rational choice and bounded rationality in political science, particularly policy analysis and public opinion research. It thereby combines political economy, political psychology, and transition study perspectives. Building on framing and dual-process theory, I argue that in the case of fundamental transformation processes with perceptible implications for people’s lives, individuals form their policy attitudes through a rather conscious and rational decision-making process. This also implies that there are clear limits to how much elites can influence public opinion about salient and contested issues through simple communication and framing techniques. In other words, people are neither rational nor irrational per se, but individual-level information processing and decision-making modes interact with contextual factors. Methodologically, I employ a comparative and mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative survey experiments, qualitative interviews, and recent advances in computational social science methods. The thesis presents original survey-embedded conjoint and framing experimental data from around 20,000 citizens from China, Germany, and the United States. It also includes a systematic review of 110 peer-reviewed framing studies in the area of environmental governance and psychology. Each of the six dissertation papers contributes to the overarching research question about the political feasibility of transformative climate policies. The first paper (published in Nature Climate Change) outlines the motivation for conducting more research into the political feasibility of transformative climate policies for both short- and long-lived climate pollutants. The second paper (in revise and resubmit at Global Environmental Change) investigates to what extent different issue frames alter public support for environmental policies aimed at reducing meat consumption and the use of fossil-fuel cars. The third paper (for submission to Nature Climate Change) systematically reviews the effects of different framing strategies on individuals’ environmental beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. The fourth – single-authored – paper (under Review at American Political Science Review) studies how policy packaging affects support for climate policies intended to fundamentally redesign and transform the food and transport system. This paper compares the effects of political communication and design strategies on public opinion, and therefore links the two central building blocks of my dissertation. The fifth (published in Nature Food) and sixth paper (published in Environmental Research Letters) have a more applied focus and address how different policy designs alter public support for food and transport policies aimed at reducing meat consumption and car use in China, Germany, and the United States. Overall, the results buttress the argument that there are clear limits to the degree that elites can manipulate public opinion through simple communication and framing techniques. However, policy design, and specifically the systematic packaging of different instruments, can substantially increase support for ambitious transformative climate policies. The findings of this dissertation also have several policy-relevant implications that go beyond the scientific contributions. In the first paper, the dissertation highlights the importance of adopting transformative climate policies in food and transport systems and outlines the practical relevance of simultaneously reporting global warming potential over a 100-year time frame (GWP100) as well as a shorter period such as a 20-year time frame (GWP20). The second, third, and fourth papers highlight that simple communication techniques are unlikely to boost public support for transformative climate policies. Politicians should therefore concentrate their resources on designing effective and feasible mitigation policy packages rather than investing energy in reframing and manipulating public opinion. A key finding of the dissertation is that politicians do not need to be overly concerned with potential public backlash against effective mitigation measures, and could in fact consider climate policy design as a political opportunity. Finally, papers five and six outline a number of concrete policy package designs for transforming food and transport systems that can achieve majority support among citizens in China, Germany, and the United States. The hope is that the dissertation will provide practical guidance to policymakers that seek to design feasible and effective climate policies to accelerate the transformation of food and transport systems.