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Sweden), where he teaches comparative political theory and quantitative methods. He also carries out research into values, political attitudes and behaviour in comparative perspective. He mainly applies structural equation models and latent class analysis to study the interplay between welfare state institutions, human values, welfare state attitudes, and party identification and voting. Recently published work of his can be found in the European Sociological Review and Stanford University Press.

While previous research shows that environmental policy attitudes depend on trust in government, existing studies have either focused exclusively on trust in politicians and democratic institutions (political trust) or conflated such measures with trust in a wider range of impartial government institutions and actors. In this study, we distinguish between trust in partial institutions that enact laws and policies on the one hand, and trust in impartial institutions that exercise government authority and enforce policies on the other, and systematically analyse their respective influence on climate policy preferences. In addition to investigating the direct influences of trust, we also focus on how trust in government institutions moderates the relationship between climate change concern and climate policy attitudes cross-nationally. Using European Social Survey data from 2016, we demonstrate that individual-level trust in both partial and impartial government institutions constitutes an important determinant of climate policy attitudes. Moreover, while we find no evidence of direct effects of trust at the country level, we demonstrate that individuals who are concerned about climate change are more likely to hold positive attitudes towards climate policies in high-trust countries, particularly where trust in impartial institutions such as the legal system and the police is high. Key policy insights. Individuals' tendency to favour climate policies depends on their trust in both partial government institutions that enact policies (e.g. parliament, politicians) and impartial institutions that enforce these policies (e.g. legal system, police).. At the country level, trust in impartial institutions plays a particularly crucial role for the translation of individuals' climate change concern into support for climate policies.. A climate policy platform with broad public support not only relies on a trustworthy political system that enacts sound climate policies, but also on well-functioning and trustworthy government institutions that ultimately enforce these policies.

While it is becoming increasingly evident that environmental problems such as climate change and global warming constitute existential threats to human societies, these problems will very likely persist and even intensify unless governments enact effective and potentially costly environmental policies. However, government policies and spending ultimately rely on public support, thus underscoring the need to increase present knowledge about the processes underlying citizens' policy attitudes. In this study, we focus on the relationship between citizens' normative views about government responsibility and their support for government spending on the environment. While people who think that, as a general principle, it ought to be the government's responsibility to protect the environment should be more likely to support increasing government spending on the environment, we argue that this relationship is dependent on the quality of government. Using multilevel analysis and data from the most recent ISSP "Role of Government" module, we show that people who think that it is the government's responsibility to protect the environment are more likely to support increasing government spending on the environment in countries where government institutions are fair, effective, and non-corrupt. This suggests that the role of government in protecting the environment stretches far beyond designing effective environmental policies, since an overall ineffective and corrupt government appears to undermine public support for critical environmental policymaking.