Maintenance Orientation in Top-Down Political Communication Increases Pro-Environmental Policy Support

Despite overwhelming evidence of the consequences of climate change, many voters—in particular conservatives—oppose pro-environmental policies. Research shows that this opposition can be overcome by reframing the issue in ways that appeal to conservatives’ motives. An important limitation to this literature is that it relies heavily on artificial stimuli in controlled settings, leaving open whether the framing of real political communication shapes conservatives' support for climate action. To address this gap, we examine natural variation in how climate change is framed in top-down political communication across the political spectrum. Drawing on the ternary goal model, we distinguish between progress, maintenance, and protection as three fundamental goals that guide climate action. We propose that maintenance-oriented messaging—reflecting a desire to maintain valued current states—is more effective in increasing conservative political support for climate action. To test this, we use a multilingual machine learning model to rate the goal orientations of pro-environmental policy statements from party platforms across four democracies and then testing voters’ support of these statements. We find that conservatives’ support for pro-environmental statements increases with the degree of maintenance orientation in the text (β = 0.27, p < .001). Moderately strong (+1SD vs -1SD) maintenance orientation reduced the liberal-conservative gap by 31%. In contrast, the degree of progress or protection orientation did not affect conservatives’ support. These findings confirm the importance of policy framing in the debate about climate change and support the practical relevance of maintenance frames to increase conservative support for climate action.