The Emotional Substrates of Environmental Preferences

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Despite the growing global public significance of climate change, popular attitudes and politicalapproaches to the issue remain highly polarised. As researchers begin to recognise that this discourse isincreasingly framed emotively, a lacuna in our existing understandings emerges; what role do emotionsplay in the formation of environmental preferences?A broad array of political science research has demonstrated the power of emotions in shapingindividual political participation and attitudes, built around Affective Intelligence Theory, whichhighlights the role that discrete emotions within the three dimensions of fear, anger and enthusiasmplay in attitude formation and change. In environmental politics, similar research exploring therelationship between a variety of discrete emotions and individual attitudes toward global warming, buthas restricted its focus to the responses of individuals to emotional stimuli. Thus, there has been afailure to explore the way in which climate actors employ emotions and the way they operate on a masslevel.In the light of the above, this PhD research will aim at advancing knowledge on the impact of emotionson environmental attitudes by answering the central research question of: in the policy area of climategovernance a) how do governments and social movements operationalise emotion b) how emotionsmobilize people to participate in environmental movements and c) how emotions affect environmentalattitudes in mass publics?The research framework designed around this question will begin with a first year developing a detailedresearch framework and extensive literature review, followed by a second year devoted to datacollection. The data gathered will then be used in the third year to fulfil two objectives.First, to establish the impact that emotions have on mass publics in relation to environmental issues,using lab experiments to investigate the impact of environmental-related emotional stimuli on politicalbehaviour and attitudes in the UK and USA. This thesis will here build upon existing research byattempting to distinguish and explore the discrete impacts of the emotional dimensions of anger,enthusiasm, and anxiety on how environmental attitudes are formed and how they change.Given the possibilities of new environmental developments generating new areas of research, thepotential to conduct a natural experiment should also be recognised, building on similarly designedstudies exploring how unexpected threats impact upon political attitudes.Second, to explore the ways that actors employ emotions in the operations of climate governance,studying the use of emotional power by actors in climate governance contexts, moving beyond theisolated, individual and reception-focused analysis that characterises current environmental emotionalresearch. This will be achieved through a quantitative emotional discourse analysis of environmentalspeeches and policy manifestos from governmental elites and activist groups, a newly emerging methodwith this thesis its first use in environmental politics. This analysis will be used to differentiate betweeneach emotional dimension of AIT and explore the relative status in climate discourse, something thatonce again has not been done before.In combining both research objectives, this thesis aims to reveal the nature of emotional discursivepower as wielded by climate actors, and the impacts this has on mass publics, in order to betterunderstand the role of emotion in climate governance. In advancing understandings of attitudeformation and climate communication, this research may contribute to the establishment of aprogressive hegemony of climate policy and the preservation of our natural world. More generally, thisthesis will further understandings of democratic health, helping us to understand the impact ofemotions in political discourse upon popular democratic engagement and understanding.