Abstract
Existing research has largely explained variation in climate policy attitudes through environmental preferences, political ideology, and partisan identification. While these measures are widely used, their interpretation may depend on the socio-economic and institutional contexts in which respondents are embedded. Less attention has been paid to how citizens interpret climate policy in political contexts where climate issues remain weakly politicized and partisan signals are ambiguous. In many developing countries, climate policy is not represented by a distinct political party or stable partisan coalition comparable to those found in many Western democracies. As a result, climate policy may be less deeply embedded in established political identities, and citizens may have fewer partisan cues through which to interpret its costs and benefits.
We argue that, in such contexts, the structure of economic insecurity becomes particularly important for shaping how citizens respond to political signals and evaluate climate policy. Where employment and income are insecure, the anticipated material consequences of climate regulation may provide a more immediate basis for evaluating policy than partisan endorsements. Individuals who face greater economic insecurity are therefore expected to perceive higher personal costs from regulatory change. Consequently, when climate policy is presented, political cues are expected to exert weaker effects among economically vulnerable respondents, who are likely to perceive the policy through the lens of their immediate material consequences. By contrast, economically secure individuals experience lower perceived adjustment costs and are therefore more likely to rely on political and ideological cues when evaluating the same policy proposal. The influence of political cues should therefore depend not only on the content of the cue but also on the economic position of the individuals receiving it. We further argue that an explicit partisan endorsement can change how citizens process otherwise identical policy information, but that the extent to which such a cue matters depends on the economic risks associated with policy change.
We test these arguments using a randomized survey experiment conducted among private-sector employees in Türkiye, where climate policy has historically occupied a relatively limited place in partisan competition despite increasing policy salience. Respondents are randomly assigned to one of two versions of an identical climate policy proposal that differs only in whether the policy is explicitly associated with the incumbent government. The policy content, objectives, and expected consequences remain constant across conditions, allowing us to isolate the causal effect of political cueing. We estimate both the average treatment effect of the political cue and heterogeneous treatment effects across individuals with different levels of economic vulnerability. Our findings show that an explicit political cue increases average policy support, but that this effect is systematically conditioned by respondents’ economic circumstances. Economically vulnerable respondents are less responsive to the political cue and show greater sensitivity to the underlying material costs of regulation.
We contribute to the political economy of climate policy by showing how the relationship between political cues and climate policy support depends on the broader political and economic context. In settings where climate policy lacks strong partisan representation, labor market insecurity can become an important basis through which citizens evaluate the potential consequences of climate regulation. Methodologically, the paper advances an experimental framework for disentangling expressed policy support from context-dependent interpretation in survey responses, demonstrating that part of observed variation in climate policy attitudes reflects differences in interpretive processes rather than substantive differences in environmental preferences, and highlighting the importance of accounting for structural economic circumstances when evaluating the comparability of survey-based measures across populations.