How Does Public Opinion Affect Climate Change Policies? Constructing Measures of Climate Change Public Concern and Testing Their Effects on Climate Policy Outputs

How does public climate change concern and policy preferences affect climate policy outputs? Prevailing explanations regarding the adoption of climate change (mitigation) policies often focus on collective action, institutions, distributive politics, and policy diffusion. Despite being the focus of many studies on public policy in other issue areas, the role of public opinion on national climate policy has not been studied simply because of a lack of survey questions repeated consistently across years and countries. Taking advantage of recent advances in ideological scaling methods, this project first estimates public climate change concern of countries of the world 1992-2022 using dynamic comparative public opinion (DCPO) item response theory model. We then test whether public opinion affects climate change policies. We find evidence that public attitude regarding climate change is positively associated with country’s climate policy outputs, regardless of whether we consider all 85 countries in our sample, only OECD nations, or OECD metrics for both overall climate policy and mitigation efforts.