Politics, human values and climate change: Investigating the determinants of climate change perceptions in Europe

Abstract: This paper empirically investigates the determinants of climate change perceptions across Europe, focusing on how political orientation and human values affect attribution- and trend belief, perceived impacts of climate change and climate concern. Previous studies in this field of research have ignored the risk of reverse causality, which is addressed in this paper by conducting the epidemiological method. By exclusively using information on second generation immigrants in 22 European countries and Israel, and information about 76 parental home countries, it is possible to rule out reverse causality. The paper uses individual, cross- sectional data from European Social Survey (ESS), the integrated European Value Study (EVS)/World Value Survey (WVS) and ancestral country averages from the World Bank. The results suggest that human values, i.e. objects that are of importance for individuals, measured according to Schwartz theory of basic values, are predictive of trend belief, perceived impacts and climate concern. Political orientation, measured by placement on the right-left political scale, is predictive of climate concern. These results are in line with previous research and indicates that reverse causality has not been a prevailing issue in earlier studies.