Franziska Quoß

@phanxi.bsky.social

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PostDoc at GESIS Cologne, prev. ETH Zurich. Research on environmental/climate politics & surveys.

Group photo of all 17 participants from the workshop “Asking the right questions: harmonizing measures of climate policy support,” taken outdoors in very sunny weather on top of ETH Zurich with a lake in the background
Intermediate steps between direct personal experience of extreme weather and a potential effect on political attitudes. We propose to take vertical (step 1 – step 3) and horizontal (alternative political attitudes) implications into account. Vertical steps include: perception of extreme weather, attribution to climate change, emotional relation and willingness to act, and political attitudes. Horizontal implications of political attitudes include: green party identification, most important problem: environment, climate policy attitudes, green candidates locally, green candidates nationally.
Effects of 34 different operationalizations of extreme weather (rows) on climate policy preferences (additive index, higher values indicate a preference for stricter policies. Each dot is the regression coefficient for extreme weather from one specification. Corresponding column markers link to the operationalization. The coefficients are arranged in ascending order. Error bars represent 95 and 90% confidence intervals. Blue circles (and unfilled squares) indicate significance at the 5% level. ‘Magnitude’ shows the effect of a jump from the 25% to the 75% percentile in the independent (weather) variable on the standardized within-individual variance of the dependent variable. Arrows point to the two operationalizations visualized in Figure 4. Individual effects include significantly negative, null and significantly positive effects.
Options for operationalizations used in prior literature. This overview builds on the operationalizations summarized in current reviews (Howe et al. 2019; Sisco 2021), extended by a literature search. We do not suggest having surveyed all prior studies relating weather to public opinion but show a lower bound for the wide variety of operationalizations used. Based on potential combinations, we can conceive at least 280 different operationalizations of extreme weather (events).