Is There Really a Risk of Public Backlash Against Climate Policy?
The concept of green backlash has recently become more salient in the news, in part due to the widespread farmers’ protests held in a number of European countries. However, there is so far not much robust empirical evidence of an electoral penalty against governments that implement ambitious climate policies.
To avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change, many countries have committed to implementing ambitious climate policies in the upcoming years.
Stepping up climate action is necessary to prevent the disastrous environmental and economic damages that we will experience if we do not achieve the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global warming well below 2°C. However, as highlighted by the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, current climate mitigation policies are far from sufficient to achieve this goal.
Many countries, the European Union in primis, have committed to stepping up the ambition of their climate mitigation policies. To understand how such policy efforts will evolve, understanding the political dynamics of climate policies becomes crucial, through mapping the drivers of public support for climate policy and the role of social movements, parties, and electoral dynamics.
The concept of green backlash has recently become more salient in the news, in part due to the widespread farmers’ protests held in a number of European countries.
However, there is so far not much robust empirical evidence of an electoral penalty against governments that implement ambitious climate policies.
The existing methodologically robust literature shows that,when present, backlash has so far been very limited and localized (see the 2016 paper by Leah Stokes looking at the electoral response to wind energy projects and the 2023 paper by Italo Colantore and coauthors investigating the electoral consequences of a ban on polluting cars introduced in the city of Milan), and there is currently no evidence that that green backlash has been decisive in any election.
On the contrary, one of the most interesting and methodologically robust papers in this context, that focuses on the electoral impact of climate policy in Spain, finds no evidence of such backlash.
The paper, written By Diane Bolet, Fergus Green, And Mikel González-Eguino, shows that the Just Transition Agreement negotiated by the Socialist Party (PSOE) government to phase out coal mining in Spain did not lead to decreased electoral support for the party at the following elections and actually produced an electoral advantage for the PSOE. The Agreement included a mix of compensation measures, including transfers to coal-dependent municipalities together with early retirement schemes, social assistance, and retraining for affected workers.
The green transition has many aspects in common with other structural changes our societies are experiencing today, like globalization, automation, and digitalization.
The social groups that are negatively impacted by these transitions overlap to some extent. The economic consequences of these transitions can become politically central when some parties, especially populist parties, exploit them to fuel polarization.
Therefore, as green policies become more central in the political arena, there might be a higher risk of polarization around them, potentially leading to a backlash by right-wing and populist parties, as we have seen for instance in the case of the recent Dutch elections.
However, there is also a fundamental role of the fossil fuel industry and of big investors in the brown sector, which have been shown to exert enormous efforts to shape the public debate and to convince the public that the transition to a low-carbon society will be detrimental to vulnerable sectors of the population. These interest groups are those pushing back because they do not want to experience a reduction in their profit margins.
While it is true that some climate policies might have some regressive impacts, disproportionately affecting vulnerable sectors of the population, for instance through the increase in prices of polluting products like fuels for transport and heating, lower income families will also be most negatively affected by climate change impacts, as they will have lower capacity to shield themselves from increased warming, and extreme weather events.
Climate mitigation policy is therefore also crucial to prevent or limit the regressive economic and health impacts of climate change itself.
Importantly, climate policies can be carefully designed to limit their regressive impacts. Compensation and redistribution can play a key role in this respect, as suggested by the phase out of coal negotiated in Spain.
Compensation can not only address distributional considerations but also minimize the risks of green backlash. For instance, the 2023 paper by Italo Colantone and coauthors shows that the ban on polluting cars introduced by the Municipality of Milan (Area B) did not produce backlash among voters who received compensation from the local government.
Whether green backlash will become more prevalent in advanced democracies in the upcoming years will crucially depend on the way climate policies will be designed and communicated.
Careful policy design, and compensation of vulnerable groups in particular, can play a central role to prevent or limit polarization around green policies and green backlash.
The European Union seems to have learnt from these lessons. A key pillar of the most recent EU climate strategy, the Fit for 55 Package, is the Social Climate Fund, whose objective is to address the social and distributional consequences of the ambitious climate mitigation measures included in the package.
The Social Climate Fund will pool revenues from the EU Emission Trading System, the carbon pricing system that regulates greenhouse gas emissions in the EU, and governments will be able to use them not only for structural investments but also to support the most affected vulnerable groups, including through temporary direct income support.
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On March 14, Bocconi’s Institute for European Policymaking and the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment organized a workshop to explore the political dynamics and consequences of climate policy.
The workshop convened scholars who have been central to contributing to our current understanding of the politics of climate policy, including Matto Mildenberger (University of California at Santa Barbara), Federica Genovese (University of Oxford), Michael Bechtel (University of Köln), and Italo Colantone (Bocconi University). The workshop was organized by Valentina Bosetti and Catherine De Vries, Professors at Bocconi University, and Silvia Pianta, researcher at the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment.
After the presentation and discussion of six academic papers, the workshop featured a roundtable discussion that revolved around the question of whether we should expect the emergence of a public backlash against climate policies – the so-called green backlash – in the European Union and other advanced democracies.
IEP@BU does not express opinions of its own. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.
