Unleashing multi-partisan support for climate action
August 2024
Glynn, S. (2024), Unleashing multi-partisan support for climate action, Zero Ideas, https://doi.org/10.70272/lzhq
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Acceptance of climate change as a Left-leaning political agenda is limiting support for climate action. New research across the G20 and beyond shows a large, untapped base of support on the political Right. We don’t see it because we don’t speak to it, so the support stays latent.
If we learn to connect with this group, we can turn this vicious circle into a virtuous one, extend the support for climate policies from a minority to a majority, and achieve the cross-party consensus that can sustain climate commitments over multiple election cycles.
A global investigation
In 2023 Potential Energy, a non-profit marketing firm creating public demand for climate solutions, carried out one of the broadest and most comprehensive global message testing studies conducted on climate change, working in partnership with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, the Meliore Foundation, and Zero Ideas. The messaging findings are presented in a research report, Later is Too Late: A comprehensive analysis of the messaging that accelerates climate action in the G20 and beyond, and in an interactive, Web-based, Global Data Explorer.
At the core of this study was a survey of nearly 58,000 people across 23 countries. Zero Ideas has now used the data from this survey, in collaboration with Potential Energy, to generate a segmentation of the ‘market’ for climate policies and messages, in order to better understand the motivations and interests of different addressable groups. This segmentation reveals two complementary target groups with strong latent support for climate action. One is familiar and well understood, but the other is less so.
Finding a neglected group
We segmented the global public (as represented by the online public across our 23 countries), based solely on their moral values and beliefs. Our model yielded four distinct groups of people, with different prevalence and characteristics around the world. Two of these are relatively unsupportive of government action on climate change, in one case because they are actively resistant and in the other because they are disengaged. But two stand out as supportive, each in a different way.
The first of these two target groups presents a familiar picture of archetypical climate supporters: politically Left-leaning, trusting in their national government, and believing in an egalitarian role for government in meeting basic needs for food, housing, healthcare and education, with society run for the sake of people at large. We call them Social Staters. They make up more than one third of the (online) population in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Italy, Kenya, Norway, South Africa, and Türkiye. As a broad generalization, the prevailing global narratives on climate change, e.g. from the United Nations and from the climate movement, fit well with this group.
The other group that is particularly supportive of government action on climate is quite different. They are politically Right-leaning and sceptical about their government’s role in their everyday lives, generally believing we would be better off with less government involvement. Like the Social Staters, they have strong egalitarian morals, but they look for equality more in shared opportunity than in government intervention in the outcome. They are optimistic, confident about the future, and believe that the world will be a better place for their children than it was for them. Particularly prevalent in the Global South, they tend to see sustainability in the context of sustainable development. Relative to the other three segments they skew younger, more urban, actively religious, and socially integrated, through their families and communities. We call them Engaged Families. They make up more than one third of the (online) population in China, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Türkiye.
Engaged Families are looking for growth and prosperity, and see sustainability as the way to achieve that, not to substitute for it. Compared with the Social Staters, they see a bigger role for business rather than government, and for countries to compete rather than cooperate. They are twice as likely as Social Staters to agree that we should solve climate change ‘to protect ourselves and put our national interests first,’ and to want to find ways to control nature, rather than work in harmony with it. They are not the archetype that people typically have in mind when thinking about climate supporters. Unsurprisingly, then, the prevailing global narratives on climate change do not fit so well with this second group.
Broadening the foundation for climate action
Simple arithmetic shows the importance of appealing to both of these groups of people. Social Staters alone are not the majority in any of the countries we researched. Social Staters and Engaged Families between them make up the majority in 15 of the 23 countries. Connecting with Engaged Families is therefore critical to winning support for climate policies, and won’t happen naturally with narratives tuned to Social Staters.
There are two particular benefits to connecting with Engaged Families, beyond boosting the overall numbers:
Depoliticizing climate action. The deep, structural transformations needed in our energy systems, agriculture, transport and industry require investors’ confidence that government commitment will be sustained over multiple election cycles. Cross-party support is critical to achieving a stable, long-term policy environment. That cross-party support becomes possible if we engage both the Social Staters and the Engaged Families. Climate change is not inherently an issue of the Left. We found in the same research that the political polarization of views on climate varies a lot by country. The extreme polarization in the US is an outlier; other countries in the Global North tend to be more mildly polarized, and several countries—including all those we tested in the Global South—have fairly even support across the political spectrum. Connecting with Engaged Families activates the latent support on the Right, and shifts the political battles on climate to practical questions of how, rather than ideological questions of why.
Appealing to the growing emitters. The Social Staters—the archetypical Left-leaning base supportive of climate action—are particularly prevalent in Latin America and some countries in the Global North, and are under-represented in the big Asian countries which have high and rising emissions (on a total basis, if not necessarily per capita). Engaged Families, by contrast, account for the majority of people in these Asian countries (among the online population tested). As the world’s carbon emissions rebalance, with emissions generally decreasing in North America and Europe and rising rapidly in Asia, it becomes increasingly important to connect with people in these countries.
A failure to connect
Engaged Families are almost as concerned about climate change as the Social Staters are: 83% of Engaged Families are ‘alarmed’ or ‘concerned’ about climate change, using the definitions from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, compared with 89% of Social Staters. Their stated support for government action on climate change is also almost as high as the Social Staters’. On average across countries, the proportion agreeing (strongly or somewhat) with the statement, ‘I support immediate action by the government to address climate change,’ is 80% in both cases (compared with 71% for the overall population). And the proportion strongly agreeing with that statement is also similar for both: 51% for Engaged Families and 53% for Social Staters. And yet the level of support for actual policies, pitched head-to-head against the opposition, is much less strong among Engaged Families. Engaged Families show an average of 65% support (across countries and policies), compared with 79% support among Social Staters: a difference of 15 percentage points. The difference is strongest in the Global North, where Engaged Families’ support is at 61%, 18 percentage points below Social Staters at 79%. It is milder but still substantial in the Global South, where Engaged Families’ support is at 69%, 10 percentage points below Social Staters at 80%. The principal figures above are summarized in the table for easier comparison.
So how do we connect with Engaged Families, and turn their real concern and their desire for action into broad, cross-party support for actual climate policies? We need to respond to their values and aspirations, which much of today’s climate narrative and messaging fails to do. That means that we need first to understand what those values and aspirations are.
Rethinking responsibility
The segmentation on which this paper is based was built entirely from questions about people’s moral foundations. We asked respondents to what extent they agreed with a variety of statements expressing moral beliefs and values. Some of these statements are derived from the moral foundations proposed by Jonathan Haidt in his book The righteous mind, and the associated Moral Foundations Questionnaire; for example, ‘Compassion for those who are suffering is the most crucial virtue.’ We also included other moral statements about how society should be organized. (The methodology is described in the research report.)
Our two segments that are highly supportive of climate action, the Engaged Families and Social Staters, differ in how they answer two subgroups of these statements: one related to the role of government in society, and one related to optimism and positivity about the future.
Social Staters stand out for believing in a strong, active role for government in society. They tend to disagree that ‘if the government spent less time trying to fix everyone’s problems, we’d all be a lot better off,’ that ‘our government tries to do too many things for too many people—we should just let people take care of themselves,’ and that ‘the government interferes too much in our everyday lives.’ Engaged Families, by contrast, tend to agree with these statements about governments being too involved.
Social Staters also tend to be critical about both the future and the past, while Engaged Families tend to be more positive, optimistic and loyal. Engaged Families tend to agree, and Social Staters to disagree, that ‘the world will be a better place for our children than it was for me,’ that ‘change is always good and a sign of progress, even if it’s not what I was hoping for,’ that ‘I am proud of my country’s history,’ and that ‘people should be loyal to their family members, even when they have done something wrong.’
It is these moral statements that define our segments (together with other moral statements which our two segments of interest answer similarly). The extent to which people agree with these statements determines which segment we allocate them to. We can then observe other characteristics that people in the same segment tend to share, which don’t define the segment, but can help to describe and understand it. This is what we mean when we say, for example, that Social Staters tend to lean politically Left and Engaged Families lean Right. The groupings are not defined that way, but they tend to be that way, given their moral beliefs. Similarly, we did not define them in terms of their support for climate action. We observe that people in these two segments, defined by their moral beliefs, tend to have a stronger commitment to climate action than the other two segments of the population—and that this same commitment translates into support for real policies more effectively among Social Staters than among Engaged Families.
Once we know more about who the members of these groups are as people, we can begin to see why they think and act as they do. Social Staters, who support government intervention and are already somewhat downbeat about the future, are relatively open to a government-led story that requires constraint. Engaged Families, who are sceptical about government and optimistic about a better future, are looking for a more empowering story about opportunity and abundance. Climate action—in many cases the same climate action—can deliver both, but the stories need to be different.
It is nearly five years since Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac argued, from their experience in negotiating the Paris Agreement, that competing for dwindling planetary resources is a futile zero-sum game, and that collaborating to create sustainable abundance, e.g. through clean energy, is the game we need to be playing instead. Our research report, Later is too late, built on this idea with its recognition that limitation is a losing frame, and that the shared motivation that people have is about protecting what we love for the next generation.
This is not naive optimism; it is grounded in loss and longing, not denial and fantasy. It offers agency, seeing responsibility as a moral choice (‘I am a responsible person’) rather than an imposed burden (‘I have been given responsibility through the position I have been put in’).
If we position government-led climate action not as an act of rationing or sacrifice, but as a responsible and positive choice to build a future of sustainable abundance and prosperity, we can connect with Engaged Families as well as with Social Staters, and so can begin to build majority, cross-party support for the policies we need.
Please download the report below, and let us know your reactions.
