The Role of Political Attention in Moderating the Association between Political Identities and Anthropogenic Climate Change Belief in Britain

Abstract

US research shows that the partisan divide among elites on climate change has been mirrored by division at the citizen level, with this division being especially prominent among more politically engaged citizens. Using British Election Study data from 2016, this article examines whether a similar phenomenon is occurring in Britain, a country that experienced an increase in climate sceptic media coverage in the aftermath of the passing of the 2008 Climate Change Act. The results show that UK Independence Party and Conservative Party partisans as well as Leavers who pay more attention to politics are less likely to believe in the existence of anthropogenic climate change in contrast to Labour Party partisans and Remainers where increased political attention is associated with greater belief. These findings point to the inherent difficulties of bringing public beliefs on climate change in line with the scientific consensus in the presence of divided elite cues.

Fuzzy Frontiers? Testing the Fluidity of National, Partisan and Brexit Identities in the Aftermath of the 2016 Referendum

“…European Referendum identities may have also become slightly more porous over the initial course of our panel, though this flattened out over the course of the last waves and as a whole remains stable. It is also noteworthy, we think, given the emerging literature on Brexit identities (Hobolt et al, 2021; Kenny, 2020; Schaffner, 2021; Sobolewska and Ford, 2020), to point out that the level of Brexit-Remainer identity switching is a little higher than switching between the two major parties: Labour and Conservative. Taking switching as an indicator of distance, we thus suggest that the older party division between Labour and Conservative is just as stark, if not more so, than the newer Brexit identities.…”