‘The Green New Deal’ as partisan cue: Evidence from a survey experiment in the rural U.S.

ABSTRACT

Recent research suggests that public support for climate action can be increased by bundling environmental policy with social and economic programs – the Green New Deal being one of the most widely known iterations of this strategy. Yet, party cue theory suggests that public support for the policy will be shaped by the strong Democratic associations of the proposal. In a preregistered survey experiment conducted among 1,203 residents of the rural western United States, I find strong evidence that the phrase ‘the Green New Deal’ functions as a partisan cue, lowering support for a bundled climate policy among rural residents by 9.1 percentage points. This depressive effect is robust even when framing around region-specific climate impacts is added to the survey question.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate policy
• Green New Deal
• partisan cues
• rural
• survey experiment
• infrastructure

Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant 2029990: RAPID: Impacts of COVID-19 Pandemic on Rural Attitudes about Federal Aid and Recovery. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Many thanks to J. Farrell, A. Coppock, J. T. Mueller, M. Goldberg, P. Burow, and four anonymous reviewers for feedback on the research design and manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. These groups include, ‘indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth… ’ (H.R. 109, 2019).

2. States sampled include Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.