Academic Projects

Despite growing interest in climate change-induced migration, we lack empirical evidence of climate change’s impacts in shaping migration preferences in highly vulnerable countries. To address this gap, we employ a novel, large-N survey, the first to sample from nearly every small-island state and territory in the world across the South Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Caribbean. We propose a theoretical framework to understand the role of climate impacts in shaping migration intent, emphasizing objective/subjective vulnerability, time horizons, and adaptation policies. Using an embedded experiment, we find that while offering hypothetical legal support for migration strengthens desire to migrate, providing hypothetical financial resources has the opposite effect. Additionally, future expectation of climate harm is more strongly associated with desire to migrate than past experiences, and exposure to adaptation policies is a weak predictor of the same. These findings contribute to the growing literature on climate mobility among those most vulnerable to displacement.

Recent election post-mortems across several democracies have emphasized the declining salience of climate change, advancing a view that pro-climate policies contributed to a perception among voters that left-leaning parties have “over-reached” on climate, generating a backlash. For this to be true, however, we would need to observe a pivotal group of voters who are lukewarm-or-negative on climate policy and for whom this is important for their vote. We test this “climate backlash” folk theory using an original cross-national survey in 17 democracies with a sample size of 21,600 respondents. In Study 1, we reproduce the “climate backlash” theory’s initial finding on declining salience of climate change as an issue, ranking tenth in a battery of twelve issues. However, in Study 2, we introduce a novel measurement technique that improves on issue-ranking salience measures by capturing both the valence of a respondent’s climate/clean-energy transition opinions as well as the salience of that opinion in their vote choice. We find a stark asymmetry with this improved measure: only 6.6% of the pooled electorate are opponents who say the issue moves their vote, while a majority of supporters (52%) say the same. In a third study employing a candidate conjoint experiment to identity the magnitude of a supposed “climate backlash” effect, we instead find that clean energy-supporting candidates beat fossil fuel-supporting candidates in 16 of 17 countries in our study; rather than facing a penalty, pro-climate candidates receive a reward. Clean energy-supporting candidates face a penalty from only the most motivated right-leaning voters.

Over the coming decades, millions of people around the world will be displaced by climate change. Despite the potential scale of this change in migration patterns, relatively little is known about public preferences toward these prospective migrants. Drawing on a large public opinion sample in ten countries representing the top carbon-emitters in both the Global North and South, this paper offers experimental evidence of the effects of linking these migrants’ displacement explicitly to climate change. I find that prospective migrants who have been forced from their homes due to climate change are seen as meriting admission more highly than economic migrants, and on par with migrants fleeing persecution, the only criterion currently included in most legal definitions of who qualifies for humanitarian admissions as refugees or asylees. I also test ways in which public opinion on climate migration is shaped by the interaction between the public’s immigration attitudes and their climate change opinions through the process of issue linkage. The findings in this study suggest that public opinion barriers to developing expanded and differentiated admissions streams for climate-displaced people may be lower that previously thought, a finding with live policy implications as governments consider how they will manage the migration effects of a rapidly changing climate.

As climate change displaces millions worldwide, possible receiving countries face mounting pressure to develop policy responses for this emerging class of migrants. Political scientists have only recently begun to investigate how climate change as a migration driver may alter the politics of immigration policymaking. In an era of restrictive immigration policy and with climate-displaced people lacking dedicated admissions pathways, what are the prospects for expansionary policy? We argue that targeted policy instruments such as a special humanitarian visa for climate migrants can garner public support even amid broader anti-immigration sentiment (as in our study’s context, on the eve of Donald Trump’s second inauguration). We theorize that information linking climate change and migration leads many voters to view climate-induced migration as inevitable, shifting preferences toward orderly management rather than restriction. We test this through an experiment with 3,095 US registered voters, introducing a novel measurement strategy that overcomes limitations of traditional immigration opinion surveys such as voters’ innumeracy over immigration levels. Respondents allocate up to 1,000 hypothetical visas across different migrant categories, allowing them to express both restrictive/expansionary preferences (by allocating many, few or even zero visas) and while also enabling relative prioritization across migrant classes. We find that information about climate-induced displacement significantly increases support for admitting climate migrants, with treated respondents allocating 20-22% of visas to this group, compared to 16\% in the control condition, a 25-35% increase over baseline preferences. Remarkably, this expansionary effect holds across virtually all ideological and partisan subgroups, including climate skeptics. These findings suggest that targeted, expansionary humanitarian immigration policies (an expansionary port in a restrictive storm) are possible even in policy environments where expansionary immigration policy is difficult.

Democrats have been told that talking about climate change will lose them votes. But that claim has never been tested in an empirically rigorous way. We fielded two nationally representative surveys to evaluate the “climate hush.” Does campaigning on climate really punish Democrats at the polls?Initial results published as a policy brief at https://2035initiative.com/climate-hush/, now being expanded into an academic paper for submission to peer review.

This project is a unique inter-disciplinary collaboration between engineers and social scientists. Using survey data collected using a geographically fine-grained mail-to-web survey methodology, we measure current adoption of household electrification technologies as part of the clean energy transition. We model present and future adoption at the census-tract level using multi-level regression with post-stratification (MRP) and model impacts on the electricity grid under multiple adoption scenarios.

This project uses multi-wave surveys across the US to elicit preferences over local large-scale solar generation infrastructure. We construct a unique, geographically fine-grained sampling frame, and employ mail-to-web survey methodology to collect rich measures of attitudes and preferences. We then use subsequent survey waves to causally identify the impacts of innovative approaches to community engagement used by project partners in the solar energy industry.

Using an innovative public opinion sampling approach, we collect a representative random sample of Americans living within 320 meters of an active oil or gas well. In this study, we measure attitudes toward fossil fuel extraction, the just transition, and preferences for local economic development and retraining policies.

This large project in partnership with global philanthropies and Arc Policy Lab measures the forces that open or close the “policymaking window” for progress on the clean transition. The project spans six data-streams across at least 25 countries. First, regular public opinion surveys will assess public attitudes and beliefs on climate and the clean transition, assessing electoral rewards or penalties for ambitious action. Second, my team is assembling a corpus of every legislative and committee speech delivered by an elected politician in each of these countries to assess how elites speak about the clean transition and who they name as influential interest group actors. Third, my team is assembling and coding every party platform/manifesto, and we will assess how parties differ in the ambition of their commitments and how platform attention maps to sectoral carbon emissions in these countries. Fourth, we will con-duct semi-structured interviews with political insiders in each country to measure how elites perceive the relative power of fossil- and clean-energy lobbies and electoral constituencies. Fifth, we will track media and social media mentions of clean transition issues and actors. Sixth, a Corporate Climate Tracker will monitor spending on politics by fossil- and clean-energy corporations and lobbies alongside governance and emissions commitments. Using Bayesian modelling techniques, these diverse data-streams can serve as inputs into a measurement model that allows us to compute interpretable and directly comparable “scores” across all the countries we analyze, which my team and I will track over time, observing how changes in particular forces exercise differential leverage over the window of opportunity for policy progress on the clean transition

Many influential studies of public preferences on immigration employ a survey measure that asks the public whether they would prefer the number of immigrants be increased, decreased, or stay the same. How should we interpret this measure when study after study tells us that the public is largely innumerate when it comes to the number of migrants admitted annually. Drawing on experimental methods from the economics and marketing literature, I adapt and employ a number of incentive-compatible “willingness-to-pay” (WTP) preference elicitation methods, resulting in a novel and more conceptually valid measure of public preferences on immigration levels.