Climate change is no longer an abstraction. People are feeling its effects today. What does this mean for politics? Our new book, Climate Fault Lines, shows how global warming is creating new divides in domestic and world politics. PUP is offering 30% off orders with code P329.

Arriving September 29 👀 Preorder link below...

Great to see two articles on climate change in the latest Annual Review of Political Science www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Political responses to climate change are polarizing around new fault lines of vulnerability. In our forthcoming book, we show that these diverging responses to climate change are reshaping local, national, and world politics. press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

We find that only people in more vulnerable places become: (1) more likely to see climate change as an immediate personal risk (2) more likely to support mitigation policy

Self-interest here means how a place will be affected by climate change in the future. Some areas are much more vulnerable than others.

Will the world wake up to global warming as people feel its effects? We argue that the answer depends on individual self-interest. We find that political responses to climate change are polarizing along lines of who is most vulnerable. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

In particular, see Tables S23 and S24, the "Credit" column.

For this reason, we checked heterogeneous effects of (1) respondent partisanship and (2) education on credit attribution to Biden. These are two variables that would predict susceptibility to misinformation -- but there's no meaningful difference.

Why? Governors are more active at claiming credit. They issued public statements on 65% of projects. The White House did so for 48%. Companies often credit multiple actors, further diluting the federal role.

So who gets the credit? Governors. 49% of respondents credit their governor for new projects — about 8 points more than Biden — and this pattern is bipartisan.

Do people notice nearby projects? Yes, though the effect is modest. Do nearby projects increase credit to Biden or the federal government? No. Proximity does not increase attribution to Biden.

Data and design: • 3 geocoded national surveys from 2024 • Distance-based exposure to nearby projects • New dataset of public statements by companies and elected officials about green manufacturing projects

The Biden Admin directed hundreds of billions to clean energy/manufacturing. Did these investments shift public opinion? We find that these projects are visible but not traceable: People notice nearby investments, but connect them to Governors, not Biden. Thread 👇 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New review article on the political economy of the clean energy transition: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Excited to start my grad & undergrad classes on the political economy of climate politics this semester 🌍 For the undergrads, I’ve added new simulations — including a day playing Catan: New Energies! Happy to share syllabi with anyone designing or updating courses.

nytimes.com/2025/05/23/b... While some GOP House members wrote letters, in the end, none would tank the whole bill to save the IRA's EV incentives.

It's so cool to see this paper in print! Relevant if you're interested in: - The domestic politics of stopping global warming - How voters understand their changing economic circumstances - The erosion of working-class support for Democrats www.journals.uchicago.edu/eprint/HBDCS...

Updated paper ⬇️ on how vulnerability moderates political responses to climate shocks. Check it out! osf.io/preprints/os...

Great paper on this:

Some new research on how time horizons affect policy preferences. Tldr: it's possible to lengthen time horizons and increase support for climate policy Open access: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Thrilled to share that my paper on electoral backlash in coal country---and the politics of visibility---has been conditionally accepted at JOP! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Check out our updated paper on when governments respond to climate change with mitigation policy papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

We also have rich interview evidence with auto workers and union leaders that reveals how uncertainty about promised benefits manifests Our findings here align with focus groups in previous work

Suggestive of our uncertainty mechanism, there is no electoral backlash in counties that received EV investments as measured with private industry data on EV investments

We find increasing EV salience caused a 3% increase in Republican vote share in the union gas-vehicle counties compared to union. And pre-trends are parallel, so this is an appropriate setting to learn about causality.

We approach this challenge with a dif-in-dif design leveraging disaggregated data to identify union counties producing gas-vehicle specific components (eg., engines) compared to those making other auto parts (eg, auto bodies). We match counties on trade exposure, socio-demo, etc

But canonical theories would predict that the UAW’s support of industrial policy and endorsement of Democrats should lead its members and communities to be more certain about the benefits of the EV transition

We build on political economy theories of reform, arguing that this uncertainty about who wins or loses from industrial policy investments can give rise to status quo bias ➡️ communities manufacturing gas vehicle parts more likely to vote for GOP pres. as EV salience grows

These trends and our interviews with UAW insiders lead us to pinpoint 2013-2016 as the period when EVs begin to grow in salience. EVs sales also start to take off.