There is a strong political divide on climate change in the US general public, with Liberals and Democrats expressing greater belief in and concern about climate change than Conservatives and Republicans. Recent studies find a similar though less pronounced divide in other countries. Its leadership in international climate policy making warrants extending this line of research to the European Union (EU). The extent of a left-right ideological divide on climate change views is examined via Eurobarometer survey data on the publics of 25 EU countries before the 2008 global financial crisis, the 2009 'climategate' controversy and COP-15 in Copenhagen, and an increase in organized climate change denial campaigns. Citizens on the left consistently reported stronger belief in climate change and support for action to mitigate it than did citizens on the right in 14 Western European countries. There was no such ideological divide in 11 former Communist countries, likely due to the low political salience of climate change and the differing meaning of left-right identification in these countries.

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Objectives. Despite the emergence of environmental concern worldwide, the social forces underlying its expression are not well understood. This research extends previous cross‐national studies by employing multi‐item indicators of environmental concern in order to more accurately portray concern for the environment as a multifaceted concept and to determine whether the sources of environmental concern are similar among industrialized countries. Methods. Survey data from the ISSP 2000 Environment data set are analyzed for 19 countries. Results. The findings are threefold. First, there are some remarkably consistent influences on both measures of concern for the environment. Second, some differences remain, which are linked with measuring environmental concern. Third, these results suggest that models explaining environmental concerns appear to operate similarly in this sample of industrialized countries. Conclusions. This investigation provides a baseline for future research to introduce additional cases and correlates to empirically test explanations regarding environmental concern's global reach.

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