Abstract
From a political perspective, advancing green agendas in democracies requires obtaining electoral support for parties and candidates proposing green platforms. It is therefore crucial to understand the factors driving green voting and attitudes. Yet, limited research has explored the role of economic determinants in this context. In this study we show that globalization, through the distributional consequences of import competition, is an important determinant of support for parties proposing green platforms. Our analysis covers the United States and 15 countries of Western Europe, over the period 2000–2019, with trade exposure measured at the level of subnational geographic areas. We find that higher trade exposure leads to lower support for more environmentalist parties and to more sceptical attitudes about climate change. Our empirical findings are in line with the theoretical channel of deprioritization of environmental concerns, as trade-induced economic distress raises the salience of economic issues.
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Data availability
The data analysed in this study are available in the Harvard Dataverse repository at the following link: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/T4ZAHS ref. 25. All data are publicly available with one exception: individual data from the Gallup Poll Social Series. The Gallup-based replication database is shared upon request with researchers who have access to Gallup data.
Code availability
The data analysis was carried out in Stata and R. The codes that generate and visualize the results reported in this study are available in the Harvard Dataverse repository at the following link: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/T4ZAHS ref. 25.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to M. C. Attolini, Y. Filippone, P.-L. Mengel, G. Palladino, A. Pisa and Y. Stuka for excellent research assistance. We thank H.-G. Betz, J. Frieden, P. Hall, P. Stanig, D. Tingley, F. Vona, and seminar participants at Paris School of Economics, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, University of Liverpool and at the ETSG Conference 2021 in Ghent, for helpful comments and suggestions.
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The initial research idea stems from I.C. and M.Z. C.B. was mainly responsible for preparing the election data for Europe, and the attitudes data for the United States and for Europe. M.Z. prepared the election data for the United States. I.C. and M.Z. prepared the trade exposure indicators. C.B., I.C. and M.Z. wrote the code and carried out the regression analysis. C.B. produced the figures. C.B., I.C. and M.Z. produced the tables. V.B. gave conceptual guidance and supported the theoretical framing and interpretation of the findings. I.C. wrote the original draft, and C.B., V.B. and M.Z. reviewed and edited the manuscript.
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Bez, C., Bosetti, V., Colantone, I. et al. Exposure to international trade lowers green voting and worsens environmental attitudes. Nat. Clim. Chang. 13, 1131–1135 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01789-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01789-z
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