Public Opinion and Political Behavior on Environment, Climate and Energy
Uneven public support for environmental policy undercuts policymaking in representative democracies. ENVENT lab members engage literatures on political behavior, public opinion and the environment to improve our descriptive understanding of public beliefs and our causal understanding of environmental opinion and behavior change. This research leverages new statistical tools to generate high-resolution descriptive inferences about the distribution and content of public environmental beliefs. It also emphasizes the importance of causal identification to the study of climate and energy topics.
ENVENT publications span a variety of contexts and topics. Some of our recent work includes:
- High-resolution spatial maps of climate and energy beliefs in both the United States and Canada, and among partisan voters
- The development of a multi-year Environmental Attitudes and Values panel at UCSB
- Panel analysis to identify the drivers of climate belief and preference shifts
- Evaluating residential water conservation policy effectiveness in California after the record drought