The carbon divide: exploring economic and cultural dimensions of climate change attitudes and climate policy support in the Netherlands

While climate attitudes and policy have become polarized in public debate, it remains unclear how climate attitudes map onto the economic and cultural dimensions of political conflict or form a separate dimension. By examining a wide range of climate attitudes (Study 1) and using a vignette experiment on climate policy designs (Study 2), this study further disentangles the ideological entanglement of climate attitudes. The findings show that while the cultural dimension is substantially related to all climate attitudes, the economic dimension is particularly relevant for more concrete climate concerns. Yet, climate attitudes could not be fully captured by these dimensions and thus appear to form a partially distinct dimension. Furthermore, we show that although the economic redistributive effects of climate policies can be influenced by policy design choices, support for different designs does not seem to differ across cultural or economic positions.