Profiles and categorisation of perceptions and attitudes among European citizens regarding the just energy transition

Abstract

Just energy transitions have re-emerged from their unionist roots to gain increasing momentum politically and scholarly, especially driven by the SDGs. In the movement from unionism to mainstream debate, the notion has acquired diverse nuances that determine its normative scope. Four major approaches have been theoretically proposed to classify views currently: statu quo, managerial, structural, and transformative. Implicitly, these approaches observe two dimensions: individualism versus collectivism, and green growth versus post-growth. Although this classification has been useful to study the positions of groups of individuals in international organisations, NGOs, and activist movements, this paper suggests testing if it remains operative in contrast with individuals’ attitudes and perceptions. Through basic statistics, clustering algorithms, and correspondence analysis applied to the most recent version of the European Social Survey (2020-2022), this contribution finds three key insights. First, although the empirical four-group classification resembles some of the theoretical traits, it does not fit the approaches. The individualism versus collectivism dimension is operational, but the environmental dimension is difficult to determine. Second, empirically, twenty-three optimal groups exist. Three groups congregate more than 90% of respondents. The remaining marginal but optimal groups point to the relevance of observing isolated profiles in the study and political planning of just energy transitions. Finally, human values show greater explanatory capacity than sociodemographic and political variables.