Climate policy support in the UK: An interaction of worldviews and policy types

Understanding predictors of climate policy support is important for tackling climate change. Previous research demonstrated that policy support is partially driven by cultural worldviews. Yet, treating policies as a homogeneous concept, this literature neglected the existence of different policy types. Making this distinction is important because each type implies a distinct solution to the same problem (i.e., carbon emissions) with varying degrees of retained freedom for agents. Given that diverging worldviews imply different preferences for individual freedom, we hypothesize an interaction between policy types and cultural worldviews on climate policy support: Policy support is stronger when the retained freedom of a policy type is aligned with the worldview-based preferences for such freedom. Using a representative sample of the UK population (N = 1991) and actual policy proposals of UK political parties, our results partly support our hypothesized interaction. Although communitarian-egalitarians, compared to all other worldview groups, indicated stronger support across policy types, contrary to our hypothesis they showed their weakest support for command-and-control and their strongest for information-based policies. Individualist-hierarchists, in contrast and in line with our argument, showed the weakest support for command-and-control policies and strongest support for voluntary policies.