The Politics of Green Backlash. Economic Concerns, Far-Right Mobilization, and Public Support for the Green Transition in Europe

Green policies are frequently met with public skepticism due to their negative distributive effects. Yet we know little about how economic concerns interact with far-right mobilization when shaping public support for the green transition more broadly. We would expect that if anti-green backlash is rooted in concerns over negative distributive externalities, economically vulnerable citizens should be less supportive of green policies than those who are well-off. If such opposition is a consequence of issue-entrepreneurship by far-right parties, polarization should primarily emerge between political camps. To test these expectations, we conduct innovative pairwise-comparison experiments in Germany, France, and Poland, enabling us to measure public preferences on a wide range of green policies. We find that the anticipated costs of green policies and political polarization jointly shape support for green policies. Preferences for individual green policies tend to be negatively correlated with their anticipated negative externalities but polarization in the evaluation of green policies is much stronger between political camps than between economic groups. Far-right voters oppose nearly all forms of green policies, while green and left party supporters support most of them. These findings suggest that devising green polices that avoid public skepticism will be more complicated than just incorporating compensatory mechanisms.