D2.1 Literature Review and Integrative Framework of Determinants of Public Acceptance and Social Feasibility of Climate Policies

Nations’ differing experiences of success and failure to adopt climate policies underscore the importance of policy design and communication in increasing public support or, at the least, in preventing widespread backlash among the public. Understanding better the factors that may potentially shape the public’s attitude is therefore crucial for policymakers to be able to successfully introduce and implement ambitious climate policies.

Research literature in social sciences that investigates the potential determining roles of different factors for the public’s climate policy support has begun to appear in the early 2000s and has grown steadily over the past two decades. This report (i) gives an integrative framework of determinants of climate policy support that this literature has identified and investigated, and (ii) provides a review, based on a structural topic modelling analysis, of the extant research landscape in this area.

A systematic search query was developed to identify all relevant studies across multiple disciplines. The search via the query conducted in January 2024 returned 3986 unique studies. The initial screening of these studies for eligibility criteria was conducted using a machine learning (ML) assisted approach. Specifically, 200 documents were selected at random and screened manually at the title and abstract level. Subsequently, we trained a ML model on the initial set of inclusion/exclusion decisions to predict the relevance of unscreened documents. These documents were then screened in descending order of relevance. After 800 documents had been screened, the model was retrained using the additional screening decisions. Then, new predictions were made for the remaining unscreened documents and further documents were screened until the pre-defined stopping criterion was reached. The initial screening resulted in a final sample of 519 studies identified as relevant.

Two types of analyses were conducted on the final set of studies. Firstly, a random subset of 298 studies was reviewed manually by a team of contributors. The aim of this analysis was to construct a narrative framework of the main potential determinants of public support for climate mitigation policy that the scientific literature has identified and investigated. Then secondly, a structural topic modelling (STM) analysis was conducted on the full set of papers in order to review the entire research landscape.

Based on the manual reviews, we report that in the extant scientific literature on determinants of public support for climate policies three broad categories of determinants can be identified. The potential determinants that the literature focuses most on concern design characteristics of particular climate policies and the public’s perceptions of the policies’ impacts. The second group of determining factors that the scientific literature focuses on are the individual, socio-psychological and socio-economic characteristics of citizens, such as their basic personal values, their general worldviews, their levels of concern about climate change, as well as different lifestyle factors such as their carbon dependence. Finally, the third group of factors includes contextual factors, in particular, the degree to which individuals are exposed to extreme weather events and their experiences or expectations about larger economic, geopolitical, and health events.

The STM analysis yielded 15 main topics, along which the research in this area can be organised. The most prevalent topics that the literature focuses on include “public opinion about climate change” and “climate change awareness and consequences” (literature looking at the determining role of individuals’ opinions about climate change phenomenon itself and their level of support for climate policy). The other prevalent topics are “trust in government and party preference” (studies looking at the role of political ideology and trust in government), “perceived effects of climate policy” (studies looking at the perceptions of the climate policy and how it shapes support), “carbon tax acceptance” (studies focused on acceptance of carbon taxation or carbon pricing), “role of framing and communication” (studies focused on the role of frames and communication in shaping policy support), “energy transition” (studies focused policies targeting energy sources and transition away from fossil fuels), and “climate action” (studies focused on socio-psychological and cognitive factors explaining support for climate action).

Furthermore, the STM analysis also explored how topic prevalence changed over time. In the earlier years, the topical focus of this literature tended to orient towards the relationship between individuals’ beliefs about the severity of climate change phenomenon and the extent to which they support climate action. Over time the topical focus has shifted towards determining roles of deeper socio-psychological characteristics of individuals and more policy-specific characteristics such as different design features of policies, as well as citizens’ perceptions of those policy characteristics.