Populist opposition to climate policy: the role of policy design

Populist actors increasingly pressure policymakers to navigate a trade-off between effective climate policy and its public feasibility. However, one may ask whether a populist worldview is inherently more opposed to some types of climate policies than to others, and if so, why? An emerging literature has found populist citizens oppose climate policies writ large. Building on this literature, we argue that populist citizens do not oppose all climate policies to the same extent. Differentiating climate change policies based on their policy design, we hypothesise that populist citizens substantially reject climate policies more if they are ‘push’ measures, leverage market-based instruments or target ‘the people’. We test these arguments by utilising high-quality Austrian panel data. We find that populist citizens are indeed less supportive of climate policy, however, this relationship is moderated by policy design and independent from thick-ideological leanings. Populist backlash is particularly pronounced for policies that target individuals and leverage ‘push’ measures. Vice versa, policies targeting companies or employing incentivising measures face significantly less backlash. These findings suggest that policy design indeed can mitigate the populist backlash against climate policy and policymakers can utilise this evidence to create more robust climate policy packages.