Abstract
Climate movements have gained momentum in recent years, aiming to create public awareness of the consequences of climate change through salient climate protests. This paper investigates whether concerns about climate change increase following demonstrative protests and confrontational acts of civil disobedience. Leveraging individual-level survey panel data from Germany, we exploit exogenous variations in the timing of climate protests relative to survey interview dates to compare climate change concerns in the days before and after a protest (N = 24,535). Following climate protests, we find increases in concerns about climate change by, on average, 1.2 percentage points. Further, we find no statistically significant evidence that concerns of any subpopulation decreased after climate protests. Lastly, the increase in concerns following protests is highest when concern levels before the protests are low.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 2916 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Nature Communications |
| Volume | 15 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Author(s) 2024.
Funding
We thank seminar participants at RWI, Hertie School, EAERE 2023, and EPG 2023, as well as Christian Flachsland, Robin Jessen, Nicolas Koch, Joelle Noailly, Steven Poelhekke, Laura Schmitz, Julius Stoll, and Malte Toetzke for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper and Richard Frohn, Marlin Riede, and Moritz Odersky for their excellent research assistance. J.B. and H.G. gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant 03SFK5C0 (Kopernikus Project Ariadne).
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Hertie School | EPG 2023 |
| Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung | 03SFK5C0 |