Understanding Political Climate Passivity in Sweden and the US

Climate worry is widespread across Western democracies.

This is unsurprising, as a broad consensus agrees that current climate politics are insufficient to avoid runaway climate change. Still, most adults do not raise their political voice.

Why?Inspired by political science and social psychology research, we introduce the overarching Climate Passivity Model (CPM). It integrates resource factors, motivational factors, and social norms.

A number of hypotheses are developed and tested, allowing more over-arching conclusions: is climate passivity mainly widespread because citizens can’t (resources), won’t (motivations) or feel they should not (norms) participate?Our multidisciplinary and international research group will focus on Sweden in particular, but also the US.

These two cases are likely to unveil a wide range of causes for climate passivity, due to considerable dissimilarities in levels of political polarization, climate denial, and fossil fuel dependency.

An innovative survey design will be used including, e.g., with survey experiments, and registry data on extreme weather events.Scientifically this project will break new theoretical, methodological, and empirical ground.

As for societal challenges, responses to the climate crisis are likely to stay insufficient without significant public pressure. Therefore, our findings are urgent, as they illuminate obstacles that inhibit the public’s climate participation.