Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/331746 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Series/Report no.: 
DIW Discussion Papers No. 2139
Publisher: 
Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW), Berlin
Abstract: 
Populist parties increasingly deploy narratives of social injustice to portray climate policy as elitist and unfair. This paper investigates how such narratives affect public attitudes toward populism and democratic institutions. We conduct a survey experiment with approximately 1,600 respondents in Germany, exposing participants to three common narratives about the distributional costs of climate policy. Our findings show that the narrative emphasizing disproportionate burdens on low-income households significantly increases climate-populist attitudes and reduces satisfaction with democracy. These effects are particularly pronounced among low-income, East German, and conservative voters. By contrast, the narrative that companies can circumvent the cost of climate action fosters climate populism among left-leaning individuals. The results suggest that the framing of how the costs of climate policy are distributed strongly shapes its political acceptance and vulnerability to populist mobilization.
Subjects: 
Climate policy
populism
narratives
distribution
JEL: 
Q54
D72
Q58
H23
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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