Climate Politics as Status Politics: Struggles over the Symbolic Worth of Educational Credentials and Class Identities in the US Climate Change Debate

In the US, environmental activists have cast climate action as a matter of deference to scientific experts at the same time as educational attainment increasingly divides partisan groups, with the Democratic Party becoming the party of highly-educated Americans. In this environment, I argue discussions of climate change have become tied to public ideas of the highly-educated upper-middle classes, and especially intellectual and cultural elites, so that fights over class-based identities are now part of what animates public emotion about climate change. As initial evidence, in time-series data, I find that Americans’ attitudes about climate change have become increasingly tied to their class identities over time, driven by divergence between high-education Democrats and low-education Republicans. Additionally, using statistical mediation analysis, I find evidence that this relationship can be explained in part by individuals’ feelings about educated elites and experts. This work calls attention to class identity as an emotionally charged site of disagreement in the US climate debate, with implications for other policy debates and current political developments as well.

Bio:

Rachel Wetts is the Acacia Assistant Professor of Environment and Society and Sociology at Brown University. Her research focuses on American climate politics and racial politics, where she examines how public opinion processes, the strategies of political elites, and the connections between them shape how we understand, discuss, and respond to large-scale changes in social relations and the natural world. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Social Forces, and Social Problems, among others.