Cool dudes in Norway: climate change denial among conservative Norwegian men

ABSTRACT

In their article ‘Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States’ the authors state: ‘Clearly the extent to which the conservative white male effect on climate change denial exists outside the US is a topic deserving investigation.’ Following this recommendation, we report results from a study in Norway. McCright and Dunlap argue that climate change denial can be understood as an expression of protecting group identity and justifying a societal system that provides desired benefits. Our findings resemble those in the US study. A total of 63 per cent of conservative males in Norway do not believe in anthropogenic climate change, as opposed to 36 per cent among the rest of the population who deny climate change and global warming. Expanding on the US study, we investigate whether conservative males more often hold what we term xenosceptic views, and if that adds to the ‘cool dude-effect’.¹ Multivariate logistic regression models reveal strong effects from a variable measuring ‘xenosceptic cool dudes’. Interpreting xenoscepticism as a rough proxy for right leaning views, climate change denial in Norway seems to merge with broader patterns of right-wing nationalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change denial
• public opinion
• xenoscepticism
• political ideology
• gender
• Norway

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Norwegian Research Council and the Norwegian institute for nature research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Our use of the concept xenosceptical to describe the data draw upon the concept of xenoscepticism which mean ‘suspicion or dislike of immigrants combined with a belief that immigration rates are too high’. https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/xenoscepticism.

2. Data was collected in cooperation with TNS Gallup Norway which is ISO certified by the standards ISO 9001:2008, ISO 20,252 (Sector standard) and ISO 26,362 (the Gallup panel that are used for this study). TNS Gallup always follows the existing directives from The Norwegian Data Protection Authority (NSD), and is controlled annually according to the Sarbanes-Oxley directive. All participants in the present study are anonymous to the research team.

3. Our goal in this paper is to offer a replication of McCright’s and Dunlap’s ‘Cool dudes’. Yet we did a few analyses aimed to follow up on Hamilton’s (and others’) findings from the US, and the exercise revealed resembling results. Using trend and attribution scepticism as the dependent variable in a logistic regression, interaction between educational attainment and political ideology came out with significant negative effects. We examined a short model containing only ‘Educational attainment’ (B = .26, SE = .11, p < .05), ‘Political ideology’ (B = -.30, SE = .11, p < .01) and ‘Educational attainment*Political ideology’ (B = -.13, SE = .04, p < .001) [Constant (B = .84, SE = .34, p < 0,01)]. The following table shows that more education leads to higher probability for denial among (very) conservatives while the opposite is the case for the (very) anti-conservative, nd furthermore that the effect of political ideology is about twice as strong among the highly educated compared to those on the lowest educational level. Even when added to the full model (equal to the one in table 4) the interaction variable had a significant effect (Educational attainment*Political ideology: B = -.10, SE = .04, p < .01). The ‘Xenosceptic Norwegian Conservative Males’ variable was still significant (B = .56, SE = .17, p < .001).

Estimated probabilities for trend and attribution scepticism by level of education and political ideology*.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Research Council of Norway [160022/F40];Norwegian institute for nature research.

Notes on contributors

Olve Krange

Phd, sociologist.