Emotional predictors of environmental policy support and opposition

Understanding the affective responses to the climate and ecological emergency is essential to the development of and compliance with mitigation and adaptation policy. Empirical evidence suggests that individuals feeling negative emotions about the state of nature and the climate are more likely to show greater support for environmental policy. This is the first study investigating which among twenty discrete emotions predict attitudes to nationally relevant British policies. We presented UK residents with three sets of contemporary environmental policies in two cross-sectional online web surveys whereby respondents rated their support (or opposition) for the Conservative Government’s manifesto, the Climate and Ecology Bill, and the Green New Deal Bill. By capitalising on a hierarchical approach that combined both evidence-based and theoretically informed expectations, we found that higher levels of worry and terror predicted greater policy support. In contrast, those who reported boredom were less supportive. These findings dovetail with previous literature and provide new fine-grained insights on complex relationship between emotions and environmental policy support. Our analytical strategy underscores the importance of integrating both a priori and explorative models to enhance statistical sensitivity, thereby capturing a broader spectrum of affective states that might otherwise be overlooked but may be crucial for designing targeted interventions.