Supporters of the Republican Party have become much more skeptical of the science of climate change since the 1990s, maybe as a backlash to out-group cues from Democratic elites

Merkley, Eric, and Dominik Stecula. 2020. “Party Cues in the News: Democratic Elites, Republican Backlash and the Dynamics of Climate Skepticism.”  British Journal of Political Science. Preprint January 25. doi:10.31219/osf.io/azrxm

Abstract: Supporters of the Republican Party have become much more skeptical of the science of climate change since the 1990s. We argue that backlash to out-group cues from Democratic elites played an important role in this process. We construct aggregate measures of climate skepticism from nearly 200 public opinion polls at the quarterly level from 2001 to 2014 and at the annual level from 1986 to 2014. We also build time series measures of possible contributors to climate skepticism using an automated media content analysis. Our analyses provide evidence that cues from party elites – especially from Democrats – are associated with aggregate dynamics in climate change skepticism including among supporters of the Republican Party. We then conduct a party cue survey experiment on a sample of 3,000 Americans through Amazon Mechanical Turk to provide more evidence of causality. Together, these results draw attention to the importance of out-group cue-taking and suggest we should see climate change skepticism through the lens of elite-led opinion formation.


Discussion
Climate scientists, politicians, and political scientists alike have been perplexed that a sizable portion of the American public rejects climate science, particularly among Republican Party supporters. Some have pointed to the role of organized climate denialists and the prevalence of ‘false balance’ in news coverage, others have highlighted the importance of ideology and media framing. Taking a back seat until recently has been the role of party elites. All of these factors could very well influence climate attitudes in the isolation of a survey experiment, but this does not mean they are meaningful drivers of the dynamics of American climate skepticism. We believe scholars need to also examine over time dynamics in the news media environment to examine this question, which has been neglected thus far in research. This paper situates climate change polarization in the larger literature on citizen cue-taking, opinion formation and persuasion. We argue that out-group cues from Democratic elites caused attitudinal backlash among Republican voters, reflected in their growing embrace of climate skepticism. The role of out-group cues in repelling partisan citizens has been less prominent in literature largely focused on persuasion by in-group elites (Cohen 2003; Kam 2005; Mondak 1993), though the importance of out-group elites have recently come to scholarly attention in the United States (Goren et al. 2009; Nicholson 2012). Our study provides more evidence of the central importance of out-group cues on a pressing and important national issue by marshaling a unique combination of text analysis, time series modeling, and experiments. We find that the most consistent factor that predicts aggregate patterns of climate skepticism in the public, and among Republican supporters specifically, are cues from Democratic party elites. We find that Democratic elite cues lead rather than follow public opinion on this topic (H1) and that they are contemporaneously correlated with public opinion even after controlling for other factors scholars have deemed important in shaping attitudes towards climate change (H2). These findings are supported by our survey experiment. We find that polarizing party cues from Democratic (and Republican) elites increase climate skepticism among Republican Party supporters (H3). We found this to be the case with thin treatments and after decades of partisan polarization has already occurred. We did not find a consistently similar effect among Democratic Party supporters, though we must sound a word of caution on this latter point. It is possible these results were hampered by a ceiling effect – Democratic supporters are already very supportive of the climate change consensus, so it is possible our treatments could not move the needle any further. The backlash exhibited by Republican respondents to Democratic elite cues rivals the persuasive
power of in-group cues from Republican elites in our sample, but it also appears to be attenuated by consensus cues signaling agreement between Democratic and Republican elites on climate science and the need for mitigation. In short, we show that the story behind climate change polarization is similar to other political issues of the day: members of the public were exposed to a large volume of partisan messages on climate change as the issue grew in salience – in this case primarily from Democratic elites – and formed their opinions accordingly. This work joins an emerging literature on the role of the media and elite cues in climate change polarization (Carmichael and Brulle 2017; Guber 2013; Merkley and Stecula 2018; Tesler 2017), work showing the persuasive influence of out-group party cues (Berinsky 2009; Bischof and Wagner 2019; Feddersen and Adams 2018; Goren et al. 2009; Nicholson 2012). There are a number of important implications from these findings. First, party elites who strongly identify with the scientific consensus on climate change or other issues must weigh the costs and benefits of aggressively communicating their stance in the mass media. The rising prevalence of party elites in news coverage of climate change was inevitable at some level because of the need for large-scale policy action, but this finding has implications for other scientific issues, such as the safety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and vaccines. Efforts to bring these issues into the realm of elite conflict will almost surely lead to polarization as an unanticipated consequence. Second, emphases on ideology and motivated cognition, while important to understanding why persuading Republicans and conservatives about the perils of climate change is a tough task at present, is perhaps of more limited utility in helping us explain how we got to this point in the first place. Republican supporters were not always so skeptical of climate change. They listened to, and formed opinions based on, signals from trusted opinion leaders within their communities. By viewing the roots of climate change skepticism primarily in deep-seated ideological and value constructs, we minimize the degree to which elites can shape those constructs. It also means that these elites can turn the tide by taking climate change out of the realm of hyper-partisan conflict. Although our experiment did not find a de-polarizing effect of a consensus cue treatment, a stronger treatment featuring highly respected Republican officials may have more success. Lastly, and relatedly, the potentially prominent role of party elites in the formation of public attitudes on climate change suggests scholars should invest less time and resources in identifying messaging strategies to mobilize support for the climate consensus, and more on understanding the motivations and behavior of party elites. Finding ways to mobilize an elite consensus across partisan
lines is perhaps the most promising strategy to bring public opinion alongside the scientific consensus on climate change.