Challenges to Inclusive and Sustainable Societies: Exploring the Polarizing Potential of Attitudes Towards Climate Change and Non-Heteronormative Forms of Living in Austria, Italy, Poland, and Sweden

Research on polarization is a contested issue in itself. One key question in this context is how strongly attitude patterns must be linked to socio-structural characteristics in order to justify speaking of polarized attitudes. Moreover, evidence of an association between attitudes may reveal ways of triggering clusters of attitudes, which can then easily be turned into affective polarization by political leaders. We investigate the prevalence of different, potentially polarizing attitude patterns among social groups in four European countries (Sweden, Austria, Italy, and Poland) using data from the European Social Survey 10. We link two sets of attitudes, namely attitudes towards climate change and attitudes towards non-heteronormative ways of life, to build four ideational types of attitude patterns. Our findings point to some associations between the two scales, which leads us to examine influence factors by Multinomial regression in the next step. High education of respondents and being female raise awareness for climate change and increase tolerance for non-heteronormative ways of life. Moreover, we find some evidence of a rural-urban divide in that residents of urban areas seem to be more open towards non-heteronormative ways of life. We argue that the analysis of mixed attitude types can be especially instructive since country effects and personal experience prove to be influential in these cases. It is precisely these cases that can tell us much about means of tackling polarization.