Who Pays for Climate Policy? Distributional Narratives and Populist Backlash

Abstract

Populist parties increasingly deploy narratives of social injustice to portray climate policy as elitist and unfair. This paper investigates how such narratives affect public attitudes toward populism and democratic institutions. We conduct a survey experiment with approximately 1,600 respondents in Germany, exposing participants to three common narratives about the distributional costs of climate policy. Our findings show that the narrative emphasizing disproportionate burdens on low-income households significantly increases climate-populist attitudes and reduces satisfaction with democracy. These effects are particularly pronounced among low-income, East German, and conservative voters. By contrast, the narrative that companies can circumvent the cost of climate action fosters climate populism among left-leaning individuals. The results suggest that the framing of how the costs of climate policy are distributed strongly shapes its political acceptance and vulnerability to populist mobilization.