Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Governments have a primary duty to protect their citizens from harm and to provide a satisfactory level of well-being. Otherwise citizens might withdraw their political support, which is a crucial component in system stability. According to the IPCC over 3 billion people are exposed to climate risks and many citizens deem their governments' climate action as insufficient. Within this dissertation, I therefore evaluate: Do Climate Change-related Attitudes & Concerns erode Political Support? The findings of this dissertation demonstrate that climate attitudes and concerns shape how German citizens evaluate their political system and the commitment to democratic norms on both sides of the climate cleavage. The central contribution is the establishment of climate-related concerns and the increasingly polarized climate cleavage more general as a credible, emerging threat to citizens’ political support and, by extension, to democratic stability itself.
Source: MADOC (University of Mannheim)
Author: Menzner, Jan
Language: German
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7134095506