Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mid Sweden University, Östersund, Sweden.
Risk Anal. 2020 Oct;40(10):2002-2018. doi: 10.1111/risa.13530. Epub 2020 Jun 11.
Previous research shows that public perceptions of climate change risk are strongly related to the individual willingness to support climate mitigation and adaptation policy. In this article, I investigate how public perceptions of climate change risk are affected by communications from political parties and the degree of polarization among them. Specifically, using survey data from Sweden, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand, I study the relationship between party source cues, perceived polarization, and public perceptions of climate change risk. The results reveal a positive relationship between party cues and perceptions of climate change risk, indicating that individuals adjust their risk perceptions to align with their party preference. Furthermore, a negative relationship between perceived polarization and individual risk perceptions is also discovered, showing that individuals tend to be less concerned with climate change the more polarization they perceive. However, the effect of perceived polarization is found to be limited to more abstract perceptions of risk, while being unrelated to perceptions of concrete risks. Even with some contextual variance, the results generally hold up well across the four countries.
先前的研究表明，公众对气候变化风险的看法与个人支持气候缓解和适应政策的意愿密切相关。在本文中，我调查了公众对气候变化风险的看法如何受到政党信息传递和它们之间的极化程度的影响。具体来说，我使用来自瑞典、挪威、澳大利亚和新西兰的调查数据，研究了政党来源线索、感知的极化程度与公众对气候变化风险的看法之间的关系。研究结果表明，政党线索与气候变化风险的看法之间存在正相关关系，这表明个人会调整自己的风险看法，以与自己的政党偏好保持一致。此外，还发现感知的极化程度与个人风险看法之间存在负相关关系，表明个人对气候变化的关注度越低，感知的极化程度就越高。然而，感知的极化程度的影响仅局限于对风险的更抽象的看法，而与对具体风险的看法无关。即使存在一些背景差异，这些结果在四个国家中总体上仍然成立。
