International Studies Quarterly
The Effect of Racial Resentment and Out-Group Cues on Support for Climate Policy
2025-11-12
Understanding public support for climate action is critical to advancing climate policy. I argue that the perceived racial distributive effects of climate policy shape the climate opinions of White Americans. Specifically, I detail two mechanisms through which racial resentment may reduce support for climate action: perceived out-group benefit and perceived out-group harm. I examine this relationship using data from the Cooperative Election Study and a pre-registered survey experiment. The correlational data show that higher levels of racial resentment are associated with lower support for both domestic and international climate policies, regardless of political affiliation. The experimental results further explore these mechanisms and demonstrate that providing White respondents with cues about people of color benefiting from climate action or being disproportionately harmed by climate change reduces their support for climate action, with the largest negative effects among those high in racial resentment. These results hold across partisan lines and for both domestic and international climate policies illustrating how racialized distributional cues can decrease public support for climate policy.