Eve is here. On one level, it’s not surprising that individuals cling to their existing beliefs when it comes to politicized topics like climate change, even when the facts stack up against them. This trend is well documented in the social psychology literature, even if those findings have not become mainstream.
For example, one study many years ago demonstrated that when people are presented with contradictory evidence, they actually double down. At a time when even the U.S. press was starting to retreat from the Iraq WMD hoax, a researcher assembled a group of people who still believed in the truth. He showed them a video proving why the claim was false, including a clip of President Bush critically admitting the claim was false.
Despite what appeared to be a decisive retreat from the Bush administration’s once stubborn claims, viewers subsequently became less, if not more, convinced of the validity of the story of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was evaluated that there is.
But the idea that some people who have actually suffered from climate change-related disasters might fall further into denial seems extreme. But this well-done study also includes the role of partisan media coverage of these events in helping skeptics find support for their views.
Written by Milena Julerova, Ruben Durante, Elliott Mott, and Eleonora Pattacchini. Originally published on VoxEU
As climate-related disasters become increasingly frequent and destructive, one might hope that experiencing these disasters first-hand would lead to a consensus on the urgency of addressing climate change. However, deep ideological divisions on this issue within the United States and abroad, combined with highly polarized media coverage, could impede this process. Combining U.S.-based data on the timing and location of natural disasters with large-scale election research, this column finds that the experience of disasters has actually deepened partisan divisions in attitudes about climate change, driving public debate and policy making. has been shown to have a significant impact on
The question of how to increase public support for climate action is at the forefront of policy debates in many countries and is becoming increasingly urgent (Dechezleprêtre et al. 2022, Furceri et al. 2021, Douenne and Fabre 2022).
However, partisan differences in public perceptions of the existence and importance of climate change have increased over the past several decades. For example, in 2001, 48% of U.S. Republicans and 61% of Democrats believed the effects of climate change had already begun. Currently, only 29% of Republicans share this belief, compared to 82% of Democrats (Saad 2021). These divergent trends are concerning because they suggest that finding common ground on solutions to climate change may become increasingly difficult in the future.
At the same time, the frequency and severity of climate disasters are increasing over time (International Panel on Climate Change 2014). Numerous studies have investigated the relationship between disaster experiences and views on climate change and environmental behavior. However, the evidence remains mixed. Some studies found significant positive effects (Hazlett and Mildenberger 2020, Deyugina 2013, Baccini and Leemann 2020), while others found mixed or qualitatively small positive effects (Konisky et al. 2016, Bergquist and Warshaw 2019), and yet another study found no effect (Marquart-Pyatt et al. 2014, Carmichael et al.
A recent paper (Djourelova et al. 2024a) revisits the evidence by examining how individuals’ beliefs about climate change respond to disaster experiences in the short term, and the lenses through which these experiences are filtered. with a particular focus on ideology as a.
Ideological differences regarding attribution of disasters to climate change
The analysis proceeds in two steps. First, we conduct an online survey to understand how individuals reason about the causes of disasters and their connections to climate change, using Hurricane Ian as a salient case study. Our findings suggest significant ideological differences in attribution of hurricanes to climate change and willingness to support climate action (Figure 1). This suggests that the same disaster occurrence can be interpreted very differently depending on an individual’s ideology. Eliciting second-order beliefs also shows that individuals are highly aware of these partisan cleavages.
Figure 1 Attribution of climate change disasters: A wealth of research
Ideological differences in the influence of disaster experiences on beliefs about climate change.
In the second main part of our analysis, we study how individuals’ beliefs about climate change evolve after exposure to natural disasters. By linking observational data on individual-level views on climate change expressed in a large-scale election survey (the Joint Election Survey) to the precise timing and location of Federal Emergency Management Agency-declared disasters, we Do this.
Our empirical strategy exploits variations in the occurrence of natural disasters in time and space for the development of research. More specifically, we compare the attitudes of respondents surveyed 4 weeks after a local disaster with the attitudes of respondents surveyed 4 weeks before the disaster. By comparing respondents who live in the same county, were interviewed in the same year, and share similar characteristics, we examine the differences in attitudes toward climate change, including geographic, temporal, or sociodemographic determinants. Separate the effects of a disaster from other influencing factors. To examine how polarization on this issue evolves after a disaster, we consider that the effect of disaster exposure on climate change beliefs varies based on respondents’ political ideology.
Our findings are surprising. We observe that exposure to disasters tends to widen rather than close ideological gaps in beliefs about climate change. After experiencing a disaster, liberal respondents’ concern about climate change increased by about 1.4 to 2.6 percentage points compared to pre-disaster levels. Meanwhile, conservative respondents’ concern about climate change decreased by 2.5 to 2.6 percentage points. These changes mean that the partisan gap widens by about 11%. Similar differences in views on policy issues other than climate change and the environment were not found, allowing us to rule out differences in responses due to socio-economic characteristics that correlate with ideology, such as income or age, as an explanation for this pattern.
Figure 2 Changes in beliefs about climate change after local disasters
Role of media narrative
One reason individuals revisit and strengthen their existing beliefs about climate change is through exposure to ideologically biased coverage of disasters. Indeed, the media are powerful lenses through which people interpret complex events, and how news organizations report these events can have a significant impact on public opinion (Djourelova et al. 2024b ).
To explore this explanation, we examine how local newspapers cover disasters and climate change and whether this coverage influences individuals’ beliefs. We collect all newspaper articles from approximately 1,200 local newspapers that mention keywords related to natural disasters on the one hand and climate change on the other. We then measure differences in the amount and tone of disaster- and climate change-specific coverage between liberal and conservative news outlets, focusing on local disaster events.
Our findings reveal clear differences between liberal and conservative news outlets in both the volume and tone of coverage. Liberal news outlets increase the amount of climate change coverage following local disasters, while conservative news outlets report less on climate change. This is despite liberal and conservative news outlets increasing their disaster-related coverage at the same pace.
Additionally, we used new capabilities provided by large-scale language models such as GPT to capture subtle changes in the tone and content of news articles related to climate change and disasters. Figure 3 shows that liberal news outlets are more likely to suggest a causal relationship between climate change and disasters. It also implies that climate change is a more important issue than conservative news outlets. Conversely, conservative newspapers are more likely to actively deny the causal relationship between climate change and disasters and to use sarcasm when discussing climate change. Our analysis shows that these differences in ideological discourse are further amplified after disasters.
Figure 3 Partisan content differences in articles about climate change and disasters
Finally, our analysis suggests that these ideologically biased media discourses may play a role in polarizing beliefs about climate. Two pieces of evidence point in this direction. First, the polarizing effects of disasters are only present in counties with active local newspapers, where residents are more likely to encounter ideologically framed climate stories. got it. Second, the effects are more pronounced when local media coverage of climate change conflicts with respondents’ ideology. For example, conservative people living in regions with high climate concern show the greatest decrease in climate change concerns after disasters. Conversely, liberals in regions with a limited climate range are more concerned about the environment.
Taken together, these findings outline a worrying trend. Rather than fostering a unified response to climate change, natural disasters can further deepen ideological divisions, especially when conflicting media coverage reinforces existing beliefs. Our findings have implications for policymakers and activists. First, they suggest that the timing of attempts to raise awareness about climate change is important. As such, the effort could provoke a conservative backlash in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Second, they demonstrate that the politicization of climate change and contradictory messages in the mass media are major obstacles to reaching consensus on this issue.
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