Abstract
Even as US partisan polarization shapes climate and energy attitudes, substantial heterogeneity in climate opinions still exists among both Republicans and Democrats. To date, our understanding of this partisan heterogeneity has been limited to analysis of national- or, less commonly, state-level opinion poll subsamples. However, the dynamics of political representation and issue commitments play out over more finely resolved state and local scales. Here we use previously validated multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) models (Howe et al., Nat Clim Chang 5(6):596–603 2015; Mildenberger et al., PLoS One 11(8):e0159774 2016) combined with a novel approach to measuring the distribution of party members to model, for the first time, the spatial distribution of partisan climate and energy opinions. We find substantial geographic variation in Republican climate opinions across states and congressional districts. While Democratic party members consistently think human-caused global warming is happening and support climate policy reforms, the intensity of their climate beliefs also varies spatially at state and local scales. These results have policy-relevant implications for the trajectory of US climate policy reforms.
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29 December 2017
The referenced publication included a methodological error that affects a portion of the reported results for registered Democrats by about 1 percentage point on average.
Notes
John Schwartz. 7 February 2017. “A ‘conservative climate solution’: Republican group calls for carbon tax. New York Times. Available online at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/science/a-conservative-climate-solution-republican-group-calls-for-carbon-tax.html?_r=0”
Josh Dawsey, Annie Karni and Andrew Restuccia. 21 March 2017. “Carbon tax debate exposed rift among Trump’s aides.” Politico. Available online at http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/trump-carbon-tax-white-house-236327
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Baobao Zhang, Chris Warshaw, Lyle Scruggs, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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A correction to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-017-2128-4.
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Mildenberger, M., Marlon, J.R., Howe, P.D. et al. The spatial distribution of Republican and Democratic climate opinions at state and local scales. Climatic Change 145, 539–548 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-017-2103-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-017-2103-0