Why is populism so hostile to the climate agenda?

It’s not just about jobs – it’s also about values

Why is right-wing populism so often opposed to climate action? This is a question Professor Matthew Lockwood has been interested in for over 10 years. In the last five or six years an enormous amount of academic research has come onto the scene looking at the relationship between populism – particularly right-wing populism – and climate change. Here’s what he thinks we can learn from it.

In post-industrial countries, right-wing populism is rising. A recent study of 31 European countries found that the share of the vote going to populist parties rose from 12% twenty years ago to over 30% now, and most of this growth is happening on the right.

This is bad news for the climate agenda, since right-wing populist parties are increasingly sceptical about climate change.

So, what is right-wing populism? And where does it’s hostility to the climate agenda come from? Right-wing populism is often understood as a worldview that understands politics primarily in terms of the dynamics between three groups. First there is the People, a homogeneous group that comes from the country’s heartlands. This is the group that governments exist to serve. And then there are the Elites who run the government. And then there is another group – a minority group. This group is seen in this worldview as responsible for distracting or corrupting the Elites, and taking away their attention from what they should be focused on – the People.    

A growing hostility to climate change  

Right-wing populists are often primarily concerned with immigration, but the research shows very clearly that both the supporters of right-wing populist parties and those right-wing parties themselves, are more likely to be climate sceptics and more likely to be hostile to climate policy.

For many right-wing populist parties, the minority group that is seen as distracting and corrupting their Elites is often immigrants. But it’s not only immigrants doing this, in this worldview. Climate advocates are another minority group who are frequently understood as distracting and corrupting the Elites when it comes to energy and climate policy.

Historically, this antipathy to climate used to be strongest in Anglophone countries – in Australia under Abbott, Canada under Harper, and the US under Trump, for example. But it may also now be changing in Europe where we’re seeing a stronger anti-climate aspect to European right-wing populism.  

Is this really about economics?

So what’s going on? There are two kinds of explanation from academic research on populism. One takes as its reference point structural change in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries over the last 30 or 40 years. The argument is that right-wing populism appeals especially to what the media often call “the left behind” communities; people whose jobs or economic security have been undermined by globalisation, technological change, and the shift to the knowledge economy.

So why would this group of people be hostile to climate policies? According to this argument, it’s because climate policies add to job losses and economic insecurities in sectors like coal mining. They also can increase taxes – which is a bitter pill for people under a lot of economic pressure.

But I think there are limits to this argument, and we need to look a bit deeper into why right-wing populism is so hostile to the climate agenda. I think it is also to do with ideology and values.

A nativist ideology

Academics often say that populism is a "thin" ideology in that it doesn’t have much content in itself, and other values have come in to populate it and give it direction. Right-wing populism in its current form in the US, and in Europe is very strongly nativist. This means that when right-wing populists are thinking about the groups who are distracting and corrupting their mainstream politicians, they think especially of cosmopolitan internationalist elites. They think of the EU and they think of international institutions.

And a lot of the institutional mechanisms of the climate agenda are international. Climate science research projects, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: these are all international. This means right-wing populism, in its current nativist form, is a worldview that is always going to be naturally suspicious of the climate agenda. The climate agenda is not only often constructed in the populist worldview as a concern of the cosmopolitan liberal elites. It is also enforced through the kinds of international institutional mechanisms that right-wing populists are predisposed to mistrust.

So when mainstream political parties think about the politics of climate change in an era where right-wing populism is on the rise, it’s important not to assume that a good economic case for climate action will carry the day. They will also need to understand that climate scepticism is very much baked into the right-wing populist worldview, and will take considerable effort to dislodge.

Photo credit: Jakkarin