2021 Theses Bachelor's

Creating Politically Appealing Climate Policies

Scheuch, Eric

Climate change is one of the most existential threats that the American political system faces in the twenty-first century. Despite widespread survey data demonstrating voter support for climate mitigation policies, such policies have failed time and again, in state legislatures, on the floor of Congress, and at the ballot box. To better understand what specific factors shape voter opinions on climate mitigation policies, I take a two-arm approach: first, conducting a comprehensive meta-analysis of existing literature on the subject, and second, testing the relative value of six variables in a conjoint experiment. My results show a clear set of voter preferences for national, bipartisan, affordable policies that persists across partisan, racial, and gender lines, and which guides us towards the type of policies that have the best chance of succeeding in both a plurality and a pairwise choice environment.