Matto Mildenberger

Analyzing Barriers to Energy Conservation in Residences and Offices: The Rewire Program at the University of Toronto

Conducting a barriers analysis is an important first step when designing proenvironmental behavior change interventions. Yet, detailed information on common barriers to energy conservation campaigns remains unavailable. Using a pair of original surveys, we leverage the theory of planned behavior to report on the most important barriers for fourteen energy conservation behaviors common in university residences and offices. Our results provide key information for individuals designing community-based social marketing and other behavior change campaigns in an educational setting, particularly for energy conservation efforts. Results also provide guidance for the process of conducting effective barrier assessments.

How to facilitate (or discourage) community-based research: recommendations based on a Canadian survey

Community-Based Research (CBR) is gaining recognition as a strategy for bridging the gaps between theory and practice and between universities and neighbouring communities. How effective is CBR and what factors have promoted and hindered its proliferation as a tool for research and capacity building? A web-based survey was conducted to investigate barriers and facilitators for CBR. CBR is hindered by the lack of resources, systemic institutional culture, and bias. Facilitators for CBR for academic and community practitioners are explored, and recommendations are presented for funders and universities to support university–community partnerships and to recognise their achievements.

The Distribution of Climate Change Public Opinion in Canada

While climate scientists have developed high resolution data sets on the distribution of climate risks, we still lack comparable data on the local distribution of public climate change opinions. This paper provides the first effort to estimate local climate and energy opinion variability outside the United States. Using a multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) approach, we estimate opinion in federal electoral districts and provinces. We demonstrate that a majority of the Canadian public consistently believes that climate change is happening. Belief in climate change’s causes varies geographically, with more people attributing it to human activity in urban as opposed to rural areas. Most prominently, we find majority support for carbon cap and trade policy in every province and district. By contrast, support for carbon taxation is more heterogeneous. Compared to the distribution of US climate opinions, Canadians believe climate change is happening at higher levels. This new opinion data set will support climate policy analysis and climate policy decision making at national, provincial and local levels.

Public opinion on climate change: Is there an economy–environment tradeoff?

ABSTRACT Does the state of the economy condition public concern for the environment? Scholars have long argued that environmental preferences decline during economic downturns as individuals prioritize short-term economic needs over longer-term environmental concerns. Yet, this assumption has rarely been subjected to rigorous empirical scrutiny at the individual level. The presumed link between economic and environmental preferences is revisited, using the first individual-level opinion panel (n = 1043) of US climate attitudes, incorporating both self-reported and objective economic data. In contrast with prior studies that emphasize the role of economic downturns in driving environmental preference shifts, using a stronger identification strategy, there is little evidence that changes in either individual economic fortunes or local economic conditions are associated with decreased belief that climate change is happening or reduced prioritization of climate policy action. Instead, the evidence suggests that climate belief declines are associated with shifting political cues. These findings have important implications for understanding the dynamics of political conflict over environmental policy globally.

The spatial distribution of Republican and Democratic climate opinions at state and local scales

Even as US partisan polarization shapes climate and energy attitudes, substantial heterogeneity in climate opinions still exists among both Republicans and Democrats. To date, our understanding of this partisan heterogeneity has been limited to analysis of national- or, less commonly, state-level opinion poll subsamples. However, the dynamics of political representation and issue commitments play out over more finely resolved state and local scales. Here we use previously validated multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) models (Howe et al., Nat Clim Chang 5(6):596–603 2015; Mildenberger et al., PLoS One 11(8):e0159774 2016) combined with a novel approach to measuring the distribution of party members to model, for the first time, the spatial distribution of partisan climate and energy opinions. We find substantial geographic variation in Republican climate opinions across states and congressional districts. While Democratic party members consistently think human-caused global warming is happening and support climate policy reforms, the intensity of their climate beliefs also varies spatially at state and local scales. These results have policy-relevant implications for the trajectory of US climate policy reforms.

ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEWS AND CASE STUDIES: Beyond the Information Campaign: Community-Based Energy Behavioral Change at the University of Toronto

For three decades, many environmental practitioners have used the information campaign as their tool of choice. Yet most simple information appeals remain ineffective and are rooted in an outdated understanding of human behavior. In this article, we report on policy lessons from the Rewire program, an innovative energy conservation campaign at the University of Toronto that has grown to reach over 12,000 community members in Canadas largest university. Drawing from the Rewire experience, which evaluated the program by using a mix of psychological, electricity, and qualitative metrics, we suggest cost-effective methods for delivering policy interventions in a complex institutional setting and explore effective methods to generate widespread changes in energy behaviors through a community-based social marketing approach. Campaign designers should move away from single-tool policy interventions to employ a coordinated set of tools and techniques that address a wide range of determinants of human behavior. By training community-based coordinators, campaign designers should also move away from hierarchical policy implementation and toward decentralized deployment of modular and locally adaptive campaigns. For behavioral change to make a meaningful contribution to energy policy, we emphasize the need for more regular dialogue between social science research and the community of energy conservation practitioners.

Beliefs about Climate Beliefs: The Importance of Second-Order Opinions for Climate Politics

When political action entails individual costs but group-contingent benefits, political participation may depend on an individual’s perceptions of others’ beliefs; yet detailed empirical attention to these second-order beliefs – beliefs about the beliefs of others – remains rare. We offer the first comprehensive examination of the distribution and content of second-order climate beliefs in the United States and China, drawing from six new opinion surveys of mass publics, political elites and intellectual elites. We demonstrate that all classes of political actors have second-order beliefs characterized by egocentric bias and global underestimation of pro-climate positions. We then demonstrate experimentally that individual support for pro-climate policies increases after respondents update their second-order beliefs. We conclude that scholars should focus more closely on second-order beliefs as a key factor shaping climate policy inaction and that scholars can use the climate case to extend their understanding of second-order beliefs more broadly.

Convergence and Divergence in the Study of Ideology: A Critical Review

Dedicated research on ideology has proliferated over the last few decades. Many different disciplines and methodologies have sought to make a contribution, with the welcome consequence that specialist thinking about ideology is at a high-water mark of richness, diversity and theoretical sophistication. Yet this proliferation of research has fragmented the study of ideology by producing independent communities of scholars differentiated by geographical location and by disciplinary attachment. This review draws together research on ideology from several disciplines on different sides of the Atlantic, in order to address three questions that appear to be of great relevance to political scientists: (1) What do we mean by ideology? (2) How do we model ideology? (3) Why do people adopt the ideologies they do? In doing so, it argues that many important axes of debate cut across disciplinary and geographic boundaries, and points to a series of significant intellectual convergences that offer a framework for productive interdisciplinary engagement and integration.

Experimental effects of climate messages vary geographically

Social science scholars routinely evaluate the efficacy of diverse climate frames using local convenience or nationally representative samples1–5. For example, previous research has focused on communicating the scientific consensus on climate change, which has been identified as a ‘gateway’ cognition to other key beliefs about the issue6–9. Importantly, although these efforts reveal average public responsiveness to particular climate frames, they do not describe variation in message effectiveness at the spatial and political scales relevant for climate policymaking. Here we use a small-area estimation method to map geographical variation in public responsiveness to information about the scientific consensus as part of a large-scale randomized national experiment (n = 6,301). Our survey experiment finds that, on average, public perception of the consensus increases by 16 percentage points after message exposure. However, substantial spatial variation exists across the United States at state and local scales. Crucially, responsiveness is highest in more conservative parts of the country, leading to national convergence in perceptions of the climate science consensus across diverse political geographies. These findings not only advance a geographical understanding of how the public engages with information about scientific agreement, but will also prove useful for policymakers, practitioners and scientists engaged in climate change mitigation and adaptation.Geographic variation in social, economic, political and climatic factors may influence public responsiveness to climate change messaging. This study shows that messages about scientific consensus have a greater influence in more conservative US states.

Correction to: The spatial distribution of Republican and Democratic climate opinions at state and local scales

The referenced publication included a methodological error that affects a portion of the reported results for registered Democrats by about 1 percentage point on average.