Experience of economic hardship and right-wing political orientation hinder climate concern among European young people

ABSTRACT

While there is extensive literature about public concern about climate change, most studies rely on cross-sectional static data. Based on a unique panel survey conducted in nine European countries in 2018 and 2019, we make a rare investigation of factors that explain why some young people (age: 18–34 years) are, have become or have lost their concern about climate and environmental issues at times of widespread discussions about the climate emergency. The analysis tests argument about the importance of individual-level factors such as values and political orientations and consider the role of cross-national variations, the experience of extreme weather events and youth-led climate strikes. Our results support prior studies as we find that young people with libertarian rather than authoritarian values, with more positive views towards immigration and redistribution policies, tend to be more concerned about climate change and the environment. We find little effect of contextual factors. Young people who have experienced economic hardship and have a right-wing political orientation are less likely to become concerned for climate and environmental issues. Socio-economic conditions, values and political orientations are crucial to understanding climate concern among young Europeans, affecting youth climate engagement at times of increasing inequalities and polarization.

KEYWORDS:

• Young people/youth
• climate change
• European public opinion
• left-right ideology
• panel survey

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. See also https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/climate/global-climate-strike.html.

2. See, e.g. https://www.euronews.com/2019/07/28/storms-across-europe; https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/news/more-countries-ever-hit-forest-fires-2018; https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44941999.

3. State-of-the-art checks were put in place for data quality as well as additional data scrubbing carried out post-fieldwork. These checks included detecting straight-liners, bad verbatim, inattentive participants, etc. Data cleaning was carried out for the two waves independently as standard practice. All panels used by Qualtrics are part of ESOMAR.

4. First wave socio-demographic data as well as wave II refreshments were validated by panel partner targeting against, e.g. age/year of birth, sex, education group and region.

5. Young people clearly are more concerned about climate and environment than older age groups: among respondents older than 35 years old, only 14% were concerned about climate and environmental issues in the first wave (in 2019, it was 22%).

6. Treating them as time variants does not change the main results in any significant way. Obviously, age varies across time, but not at a different rate between individuals.

7. While the presented figure reports the results of the Model 2, where the value of the independent variables comes from wave I, we have conducted a robustness check by analysing the same models for the case when the values of independent variables come from wave II (see Table A3 in the Appendix). The majority of the results remain the same. The only small differences appear in respect of the economic hardship (relative deprivation), though the effect remains significant and substantial for the comparison between groups of ‘never concerned’ and ‘always concerned’. Hence, we consider that the negative effect of economic hardship on concerns about climate and the environment is robust.

Additional information

Funding

Results presented in this article have been obtained within the project ”Reinventing Democracy in Europe: Youth Doing Politics in Times of Increasing Inequalities” (EURYKA), funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Programme [grant agreement no. 727025]. The authors are grateful to the EURYKA team for their comments on previous versions of this article and the journal's reviewers and editors. Martín Portos acknowledges support from the Conex-Plus Marie Sklodowska-Curie programme [grant agreement no. 801538].