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Democracy and Public Opinion Formation: How Illiberal Regimes Suppress Climate Change Concern

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  • Levi, Sebastian
  • Goldberg, Matthew H.

Abstract

Do illiberal regimes suppress public discourse on environmental problems? We advance theory on environmental information control and test whether civil liberties have influenced the diffusion of climate change concern across 118 countries. Using a spatial model of synthetic panel data from 611,909 individuals, we find each unit change in the 7-point civil liberty index to impact climate change concern by 5 [95% CI: ±2] percentage points in the short term, a result that is robust to unobservable confounding and consistent across thousands of plausible model specifications. We find the effect to be even stronger for affluent countries, but much smaller for low-income countries and highly educated cohorts. A spatial system of seemingly unrelated regressions suggests that news coverage and protest activities could be pathways for civil liberties to influence public opinion. Our study has implications for the merits of democratic governance of climate change and for comparative public opinion formation.

Suggested Citation

  • Levi, Sebastian & Goldberg, Matthew H., 2021. "Democracy and Public Opinion Formation: How Illiberal Regimes Suppress Climate Change Concern," SocArXiv 6vk9d_v1, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:6vk9d_v1
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/6vk9d_v1
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