Research

Few contemporary crises have reshaped public policy as dramatically as the COVID-19 pandemic. In its shadow, policymakers have debated whether other pressing crises—including climate change—should be integrated into COVID-19 policy responses. Public support for such an approach is unclear: the COVID-19 crisis might eclipse public concern for other policy problems, or complementarities between COVID-19 and other issues could boost support for broad government interventions. In this research note, we use a conjoint experiment, panel study, and framing experiment to assess the substitutability or complementarity of COVID-19 and climate change among US and Canadian publics. We find no evidence that the COVID-19 crisis crowds out public concern about the climate crisis. Instead, we find that the publics in both countries prefer that their governments integrate climate action into COVID-19 responses. We also find evidence that analogizing climate change with COVID-19 may increase concern about climate change.

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 among the first 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 than previously thought—a finding with live policy implications as governments consider how they will manage the migration effects of a rapidly changing climate.

This book-length, comparative politics dissertation project at the frontier of political science research on migration asks: what are the prospects for creating policies that provide differentiated admissions pathways for climate migrants in advanced industrialized democracies?

Climate change is an emergent migration driver—and policies to provide protection and admission to people displaced by climate change require both the public and politicians to link two previously independent issues (immigration and climate change).

Taking the canonical model of immigration as a starting point, this dissertation asks how linking immigration and climate change alters (i) public preferences, and (ii) interest group coalitions in support of expansionary immigration policy.

At the level of public opinion, I explore how linking a prospective migrant’s reason for migrating to climate change can engender sympathy in receiving-country publics. I also examine how planning for future (climate change-driven) migration alters the salience of the migration debate.

At the level of interest group coalition-building and lobbying, I argue that climate/migration issue linkage expands the coalition in support of expansionary immigration policy—particularly in policy making contexts characterized by relatively low polarization—and I examine the effects of this altered interest group coalition environment on policy outcomes.

Together with a team comprised of social scientists from UC Santa Barbara, Princeton, Georgetown, and Utah, I conducted the first large-N survey of residents of the world’s small island nations: a survey sample consisting of over 15,000 respondents.

Drawing on data from a survey of the world’s small island nations, I provide the first large-N experimental evidence of what shapes the protection demands of people most vulnerable to displacement due to climate change. In particular, I assess how variation in protection and humanitarian admissions regimes affects perceptions of fairness, making an empirical contribution to a growing literature on climate justice.

Existing literature on the migration intentions (and reasons for migrating) of climate-displaced people finds mixed effects of slow-onset environmental on the decision to migrate. This project employs a refined measure of the intention to migrate, linking both objective and perceived climatic change to this intention. Primarily descriptive, this project provides novel and essential large-N data from a survey of the world’s small island nations on perceptions of climate vulnerability and intention migrate.

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.

An important normative feature of climate change as a migration driver is that advanced industrialized democracies are directly responsible for the driver through the relatively higher levels of carbon dioxide they emit into the earth’s atmosphere. Drawing on new survey experimental data, I test whether invoking responsibility for climate change affects public preferences over (i) admitting climate migrants, and (ii) the number of climate-displaced people admitted.