Alexander F. Gazmararian

Popular debates about political barriers to the energy transition increasingly acknowledge the mass public's role, but often summarize its importance with amorphous concepts like "political" or "public will." This essay clarifies how the public's beliefs, preferences, and behaviors affect the clean energy transition through three channels: policymaker incentives, electoral selection, and technology adoption and siting. In turn, we consider how energy and climate policy design can influence mass public preferences, emphasizing cost and benefit visibility, public perceptions of distributional effects, and cross-domain policy linkages. Drawing from our framework, we outline priorities for public opinion research on the clean energy transition.

What explains the shift to Republicans in places that historically voted for Democrats? This paper tests a new explanation for part of this reversal. The shale gas revolution displaced coal, which intensified the salience of national environmental regulations and increased support for Republican presidential candidates. Analysis of presidential elections from 1972 to 2020 with a difference-in-differences design finds that the shale gas shock increased Republican presidential vote share by 4.9 percentage points. Geospatial data, media analysis, and interviews show that voters blamed environmental regulations for their community's decline and that the backlash was more likely to occur where the shale shock was least visible. The attribution of blame for economic dislocation helps to explain electoral behavior in places "left behind," and sheds light on political responses to climate policy.

The short time horizons of citizens are a prominent explanation for why governments fail to tackle significant long-term public policy problems. Evidence for the influence of time horizons is mixed, complicated by the difficulty of determining how attitudes would differ if individuals were more concerned about the future. This paper approaches the challenge by leveraging a personal experience that leads people to place more value on the future: parenthood. The analysis compares new parents with otherwise similar individuals using a matched difference-in-differences design with a three-wave panel. The results show that parenthood increases support for stopping climate change. Falsification tests and two survey experiments suggest that longer time horizons explain part of this shift in support. Not only are scholars right to emphasize the role of individual time horizons, but changing valuations of the future offer a new way to understand how policy preferences evolve.

Why do some countries pass laws to reduce emissions that cause climate change while others do not? We theorize that climate change-related disasters cause politicians to view global warming as more proximate, but whether they have incentives to enact mitigation laws depends on their country's geographic vulnerability to future damages. We use a spatial integrated assessment model to measure global warming's local economic effects, which allows us to predict how political leaders respond to disasters based on their vulnerability. An analysis of mitigation laws from 1990–2020 in 155 countries shows that only governments in locations facing the greatest future climate damage react to disasters by passing mitigation policies. Distinct from the historical North-South divide, our findings highlight a growing geographic cleavage in national responses to climate change.

What are fossil fuel communities' preferences over the design of just transition assistance accompanying climate policy? This study conducted survey experiments at Appalachian county fairs to answer this question, overcoming barriers that have limited previous attempts to measure preferences in these crucial regions. Comparing the responses to a new national survey, there is a divergence in preferences for policies encouraging relocation, but there is convergence behind support for policies that reduce costs to fossil fuel workers. The study also finds that an intervention to provide information about coal's decline shifted preferences toward supporting the clean energy transition. Rather than public opinion being an immutable barrier to climate action, 66% of fossil fuel community residents would endorse climate policy if it were coupled with just transition assistance. Policy design and informational interventions could help to create climate coalitions, even in the places most affected by the clean energy transition.

Disparities in renewable energy deployment disproportionately afflict marginalized communities and slow the clean energy transition necessary to combat climate change. Most solutions focus on top-down government initiatives to subsidize renewable energy. However, this approach has had mixed efficacy, raises questions about the durability of support, and lacks political feasibility in certain contexts. We propose a new energy development model that leverages the logic of polycentric governance, which refers to having multiple centers of decision-making as opposed to one. Our model rethinks the practice of net metering, where households and organizations can sell excess power back to the grid. Rather than pocketing the proceeds, our model taps into individual altruism by allowing households and organizations to donate some of this money to build renewable energy for underserved communities. This could accelerate clean energy development by providing resources and fostering collaboration between communities and power companies. Our framework represents a novel decentralized approach to a "just energy transition" that complements government-led initiatives. This paper describes the program, discusses design issues, and presents proof-of-concept survey research from the United States.

The United States government passed a climate law in 2022 that is estimated to spend over half a trillion dollars to incentivize clean energy production and manufacturing. Policymakers intend for these new green projects to create political constituencies that support the clean energy transition. This paper tests this hypothesis using geolocated survey and investment data. We find that while the public sometimes recognizes visible green projects in their community, this proximity does not affect credit attribution. Overall, Americans view their governors as more responsible than the federal government for green investments. Using an original database of project announcements, we find that governors are more active in claiming credit than federal politicians. This mixed information environment provides one reason why the public does not do more to credit the federal government for green investments. When it is challenging for people to trace economic outcomes back to public policies, reforms are unlikely to affect mass opinion.

People are increasingly feeling global warming's effects through extreme heat and natural disasters. How do these climate shocks affect political attitudes? We argue that the effect of climate-related experiences depends significantly on self-interest. People in more vulnerable locations are more likely to respond to climate shocks with greater concern and more support for mitigation policy. We test this argument with a macroeconomic model of climate change, geospatial data on climate shocks, and survey data of 148,712 people across 137 countries, and over time with the same 9,500 individuals in the United States. The results show that climate shocks heighten risk perceptions and lead to greater support for mitigation policies only among people in climate-vulnerable places. This responsiveness to experience is most evident in democratic countries and among people whose livelihoods depend on the weather. Integrating political economy and behavioral theories helps to explain how political attitudes change.

Why are some countries more successful at advancing the clean energy transition than others? Existing studies focus primarily on industrialized democracies and frame domestic and international explanations against each other. Instead, we develop a unifying framework around the idea of credibility to explain clean energy transition outcomes in developed and developing countries and shed light on the prospects for future reform efforts. We elucidate the credibility challenges reformers confront and point to new directions for the comparative and international study of energy transitions necessary to respond to the climate crisis.

What are green industrial policy's electoral effects? There has been a global resurgence in industrial policy on the premise that it sidesteps voter opposition. But we argue that industrial policy can cause backlash when it has unequal effects within sectors. Communities that face job threats should vote for politicians who oppose the energy transition. We leverage disaggregated data to identify counties with jobs at risk from vehicle electrification spurred by industrial policy. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that the EV transition increased Republican presidential vote share by 2.5 percentage points in vulnerable counties compared to the matched control group. Rather than the national union stemming backlash by unifying labor and the left, our interviews show how local unions provided information that reinforced worker fears. Climate reforms with unequal effects undermine industrial policy's political logic and cut new cleavages between left parties and the working class.