Not in My Basement:The Political Costs of Climate Action

Abstract

Many democracies experience mass opposition to climate reforms, yet the drivers of this backlash remain insufficiently understood. We argue that policy uncertainty surrounding clean-energy reforms enables political narratives and subjective cost perceptions to undermine reform support. We study Germany’s heating reform using a difference-in-differences analysis of electoral outcomes and an original survey featuring large-scale, AI-assisted qualitative interviews. While local reform exposure did not trigger systematic electoral punishment, beliefs about exposure and narratives about the law shaped its political fallout. We show that exposure perceptions diverged from households' heating conditions, influenced by partisanship and voter heuristics that link the law to rising energy prices. Voters' exposure perceptions and narratives of government overreach explain opposition to the heating law and clean-energy reforms more broadly. Supplementary survey experiments show that policy design features only marginally increase reform support. Our findings reveal how material exposure and narratives interact to drive opposition to climate reforms.

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