Institutional quality shapes who citizens hold responsible for climate change mitigation

Despite growing consensus on the urgency of climate action, public beliefs about who is primarily responsible for climate change mitigation vary widely across countries, and little is known about what explains this variation. Drawing on data from 106 countries (N = 101,728), we examined how indicators of national institutional quality (government effectiveness, regulatory quality, corruption control, and rule of law) shape people’s attributions of climate responsibility for governments, businesses and individuals. Results showed that the higher a country’s institutional quality, the more likely its citizens were to attribute responsibility for climate mitigation to businesses. In contrast, government responsibility attributions followed a U-shaped relationship for institutional capacity dimensions (government effectiveness and regulatory quality), such that citizens in countries with very low or very high institutional capacity were more likely to hold governments responsible than those in countries with moderate institutional quality. Individual responsibility attribution showed the opposite pattern (inverted U-shaped), with citizens in countries with moderate institutional quality most likely to view individuals as responsible. These associations held after controlling for GDP per capita, perceived importance of climate change, and demographic factors. These findings show that variations in institutional quality are linked to how citizens assign responsibility for climate change mitigation, which suggests that climate mitigation strategies cannot be divorced from institutional contexts.