“My Name Is Called Disturbance" - Public Support for Radical Climate Collective Actions: Political and Environmental Identity Drivers

Radical collective actions are becoming increasingly visible in climate change-mitigating activism, yet research on their perception and support remains limited. In the set of three studies, we explored how the general public (study 1) and a pro-environmentally engaged group (study 2) perceive different pro-environmental collective actions and how support for these is associated with political beliefs, including right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), and environmental identification (study 3). In Study 1 conducted on a representative national sample (N = 530), we assessed perceptions of 97 diverse climate-related actions across six dimensions: general affect, non-normativity, use of violence, effectiveness, perceived legality, and willingness to engage. We identified four clusters of actions: positively assessed (e.g., publishing literature), moderately assessed (e.g., political mourning), negatively assessed (e.g., organizing demonstrations), and very negatively assessed (e.g., vandalizing artworks). In Study 2, we checked and compared how these behaviours were evaluated on the same dimensions by the environmentally engaged group (N=49). Pro-environmental sample perceived collective actions generally more favourably than the general sample on all dimensions except for effectiveness, where no significant differences were present. Study 3 (representative national sample, N = 1016) revealed that support for the most moderate actions (Cluster 1) was negatively associated with RWA and SDO and positively associated with environmental identification. Similar associations were observed for Clusters 2 and 3. In contrast, support for the most radical actions (Cluster 4) was positively associated with SDO and negatively with environmental identification, showing no significant relationship with RWA. These findings indicate that the relationships between the variables and support for radical climate actions differ significantly from those for moderate environmental actions.