Extreme weather and climate change attitudes: Limited partisan motivated reasoning in response to Sweden's 2018 heatwave

Abstract

Research suggests that the extent to which exposure to extreme weather events reduces the ‘psychological distance’ of climate change and strengthen policy attitudes, is moderated by partisanship and ideology. Still, evidence remains mixed, and it is unclear to what extent such moderation effects are conditioned by the political context. In this paper, we investigate how extreme weather events affects climate change attitudes in a context defined by an overarching political consensus on climate change. Focusing on Sweden, and the extremely warm summer of 2018, we use gridded meteorological data and nationally representative survey data to estimate how extremes in temperature and precipitation, and exposure to wildfire, affects climate change attitudes. While results show that exposure to extremes increases both climate change concern and policy support, there is almost no evidence that political stance moderates this effect. The politicization of individual experiences of extreme events are thus limited in this political context.