Study finds Trump Effect in U.S. over belief in ‘climate change’: In 2016, Republicans had ‘a noticeable rise’ of being ‘climate change believers’ after UN Paris pact – But ‘by 2018, after Trump withdrew from the UN Paris Agreement…belief partially reversed, with more (GOP) individuals returning to higher skepticism’
Backlash or reinforcement? Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration and shifting climate beliefs in the United States
Efforts to counter climate change skepticism have become a key sociopolitical issue. Researchers increasingly recognize the role of “elite cues” from political leaders in shaping climate attitudes; yet quantitative analysis of specific recent events, such as President Trump’s 2017 inauguration, remains limited. Through two research objectives, this study examines whether Trump’s first inauguration modified the association between political identity (Democrat, Republican, and Independent) and overall climate change beliefs among Americans, and whether it influenced support or opposition for specific environmental policies, such as fracking and nuclear energy. Multinomial regression models, controlled for socio-demographic variables, reveal significant changes in association, as well as a potential “backlash effect”: the administration’s anti-climate stance appeared to strengthen pro-climate beliefs among Democrats and Independents, while Republicans’ beliefs remained largely unchanged. The study’s findings invite a more complex interpretation, compared to earlier literature, of the impacts of political cues on climate skepticism today.
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In the context of the literature on climate skepticism, our results qualitatively align with the observation that party identification is strongly associated with climate skepticism, even after controlling for other socio-demographic variables. Polls and studies have consistently found that Democrats and liberals tend to express greater support for measures such as carbon emission regulations, alternative energy development, and international climate agreements, while Republicans often prioritize economic considerations when evaluating climate proposals10,33,34,35,36. Unfortunately, many of these polls did not always (or consistently) control for socio-demographic factors, and the issue of how (if at all) any such associations were modified by political cues from elites15,16—in the case of this study, cues from the first Trump election cycle–remained to be studied.
Using two complementary models, we showed through our first research objective that such modifications in association occurred and were significant, but notably asymmetric. Our year fixed-effects model shows that the period from March 2015 to March 2016 marks a major shift in climate beliefs. During this period, Republicans had a noticeable rise in the probability of being classified as climate change believers alongside a drop in the probability of being skeptics. Democrats’ probability of belonging to the believer category also increased substantially. These trends suggest that there might be an early cross-partisan positive reaction—probably driven by the global attention and legitimacy generated by the Paris Climate Agreement, at a time when Republican primaries were still underway and clear partisan cues had not yet emerged.
By 2018, after President Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement in mid-2017, these trends started to diverge further. Democrats, already moving toward higher levels of belief, continued shifting out of the mixed middle category into the believer group. Meanwhile, Republicans’ previous jump in belief partially reversed, with more individuals returning to higher skepticism or staying in the mixed middle. By 2020, over 80% of Democrats were classified as believers, compared with about 16% of Republicans. Moreover, the 95% confidence intervals for Republicans’ believer estimates in 2016 and 2018 do not overlap, indicating a statistically meaningful change. Given that the United States electorate is almost uniformly divided between registered Republicans and Democrats, with Independents often cited as a key voting bloc (especially in Presidential elections37,38) this overall shift suggests that the Trump administration’s adversarial approach to climate change policy (including rolling back environmental regulations and withdrawing from the Paris Agreement) may have, in a paradoxical way, heightened the role of climate beliefs in shaping partisan identity and deepened the partisan divide39,40.
Reasons for this “backlash effect” are likely complex and may necessitate approaches like structural equation models41,42 to appropriately quantify, assuming the availability of appropriate data (in itself a significant challenge). Among other potential causes, they may include increased media coverage of climate change’s impacts10, advocacy by think tanks and partisan organizations9, concurrent increases in climate activism, exemplified by events such as youth-led climate strikes41,43, (albeit, not uniformly across political groups35), motivated reasoning and cognitive biases44, and the “boomerang” effect noted by Hart and Nisbet45, wherein efforts to change opinions can backfire if the information conflicts with individuals’ pre-existing beliefs, especially among those with strong ideological views.