Climate change and the welfare state? Exploring Australian attitudes to climate and social policy

Abstract

Despite growing evidence of significant impacts from human-induced climate change, policy responses have been slow. Understanding this policy inertia has led to competing explanations, which either point to the need to build a consensual politics separated from economic partisanship, or which encourage solidarities between environmental and social movements and issues. This article analyses a recent successful mobilisation, leading to the passage of the Clean Energy Act in Australia, to explore the relationship between attitudes to environmental and social protection, particularly among the core constituency in favour of stronger climate action. Using social survey data from the Australian Election Study, the article finds evidence of independent associations between prioritising environmental concerns and support for welfare state expansion, and a realignment of materialist and post-materialist values. This we argue is consistent with Polanyian analysis that posits a link between social and environmental causes based on resistance to commodification.

Keywords

climate policy political attitudes social policy welfare state

Climate change is the most significant environmental challenge facing contemporary society. Emerging out of broader environmental concerns that gained momentum from the 1960s, scientists have increasingly raised the issue of human-induced climate change with policy makers. The scientific evidence showing humans contribute to climate change and the likely scale of its impact on society is now overwhelming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2013) recently confirmed that evidence for the human contribution to climate change is ‘virtually certain’ and that sweeping climatic changes are increasingly likely by the century’s end. Yet, as the urgency for a global response has increased, international action on climate change has stalled after negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol.

The lack of effective policy action is of growing concern to many scholars, policy analysts and citizens. Responding to climate change is now widely acknowledged to be a ‘wicked problem’ (Lazarus, 2009). Climate policies tend to have high upfront costs and distant benefits. These policies favour smaller industries with low employment over powerful incumbent industries. The constituencies that most clearly benefit materially from climate policies (future generations and non-human species) do not vote. Effective policy requires global action in the context of national polities. And there is considerable uncertainty over the problem itself, not so much that climate change is happening, but the nature, timing and scale of likely impacts at different concentrations of various gases in the atmosphere.

The difficulties posed in addressing climate change, however, have been matched by strong community concern. In Australia, this peaked in the lead-up to the 2007 federal election. Climate policy was a significant campaign issue, and was identified as one of the central concerns of the new prime minister, Kevin Rudd (Rootes, 2008). This article focuses on this successful mobilisation of popular support in favour of climate action to explore the dynamics of a potential climate constituency. Specifically, it tests the extent to which this constituency combines environmental concerns with traditional welfare state concerns, or is more traditionally post-materialist, as a test of two emerging conceptions of climate policy politics.

Scholarship has focused growing attention on the political challenge of climate change. Much of this literature has attempted to understand the policy dynamics of climate change as a distinct policy arena, identifying tactics that distance it from other agendas. Bailey et al. (2012), for example, argue that enacting change through more technocratic processes, engaging expert opinion and distancing decisions from electoral contests is most likely to prove successful. Anthony Giddens’ The Politics of Climate Change (2009) explicitly identifies a consensual bipartisan strategy for addressing climate policy, and therefore tends to advocate policies that require less radical transformations of the broader political economy.

Alternatively, more radical scholarship directly links climate policy to other policy transformations. Following the global financial crisis, theorists have linked issues of financial instability, inequality and sustainability (Kevin, 2009), suggesting ecological changes are intertwined with social justice. Social theorists have identified potential links between older labour and social democratic movements and the more recent environmental movements, claiming a new dynamic to anti-systemic opposition in a post-industrial and globalised world (Block, 2008). This political economy tradition has developed an approach to policy analysis that links sets of policies into policy regimes, particularly around the development of policies of social protection associated with the welfare state. Both Esping-Andersen’s (1990) ‘worlds of welfare’ and Hall and Soskice’s (2001) ‘varieties of capitalism’ suggest that specific policies should be viewed in the context of the broader organisation of interests in the polity.

The difference in these approaches can be partly understood through the politics of post-materialism. In the 1970s, Ronald Inglehart (1977) claimed that post-industrial economies gave rise to a post-materialist politics that eroded the strong class and partisan cleavages that underpinned the different ‘class settlements’ of various social policy regimes. Environmental claims were part of this new politics, associated with an educated social base and new political actors who did not sit comfortably with (or explicitly rejected) the left–right politics of 20th-century democracy. This suggests the possibility of new political alliances that sit outside partisan cleavages, offering the potential for consensus-based and bipartisan political strategies. Alternatively, an emerging strand of social theory, in part based in the work of Karl Polanyi (1944), identifies commonality between the class-based claims of social democracy, which resist the exploitative implications of commodifying labour, and environmentalist claims, which resist the exploitative implications of commodifying land (Gough, 2008).

This article focuses on these alternative explanations of environmentalism and strategies for achieving climate policy change in the context of Australia’s recent climate debates. Acknowledging the limitations of the policy shift that was achieved, it examines how a political constituency was mobilised in favour of substantial action. As others have noted, the subsequent policy failure partly stemmed from parliamentary tactics and dysfunction within the Labor government (Chubb, 2014), an analysis of which lies beyond the scope of this article. Rather, we focus on the constituency that was mobilised through the 2007 election in support of climate action. We ask which voters prioritised climate and environmental issues, and what possibilities remain for rebuilding this core constituency in the future. The article focuses particular attention on the attitudes of this group of voters to more traditional questions of class, specifically about social spending and income distribution. In doing this, we seek to understand the extent to which those focused on climate change might be mobilised around a broader agenda. To the extent that this is the case, we argue there are some grounds for more fully exploring the political economy thesis that seeks to link climate policy action to broader transformations.

The article initially explores the existing literature on the potential overlap between the policy problems addressed by social protection and those presented by climate change. This forms a theoretical framework for the subsequent empirical analysis. The bulk of the article then focuses on the Australian case. We give a background to environmental politics in Australia and to recent elections. We then explore Australian Election Study (AES) data for the 2007 election, which preceded Labor’s attempts to pass climate legislation. Our analysis focuses on voters who prioritised environmental and climate issues. We test for three potential associations with the likelihood of prioritising environmental concerns: partisanship, post-materialist values and support for protective and redistributive policies. Having identified evidence of all three, we then develop a regression model to examine the interaction of these effects, and the extent to which welfare state attitudes independently relate to environmental attitudes. In concluding, we discuss the results and their potential implications for understanding the politics underlying climate change.

Approaching climate policy as social protection

Environmental studies often link issues of sustainability to those of social justice (see Eckersley, 1992). This has recently been applied to developing a common political sociology of the welfare state and climate change. Many have viewed climate policy as an attempt to provide a public good in the face of market failure (Garnaut, 2008). As with the provision of public goods such as health services, public education and housing, social policy has been perceived to respond to market failures in delivering affordable services at sufficient levels to meet demand (Block, 1994: 693). Similarly, climate policies can provide public goods such as investment in cleaner energy production and schemes that lower carbon emissions to reduce the negative externalities from many forms of productive economic activity (Meadowcroft, 2005: 7).

Similarly, many acknowledge that climate policies manage forms of social risk, which entail those risks that have social rather than individual causes (Dryzek, 2008; Giddens, 2009). In its various forms, social policy manages risks to individual well-being over the life course, particularly the risks of poverty and ill health (Barr, 2001). Climate policies manage the risks from climate change, including: environmental disasters; indirect risks from increasing competition over resources; and risks from policy responses, such as distributive consequences and threats to carbon intensive economic activity (Gough, 2008: 325).

Moreover, theorists argue that social policy decommodifies social risks (to some extent) in ways complementary to the environmental objectives of climate policies. Used famously by Esping-Andersen (1990) to emphasise how social policy is a state response to the negative effects of commodifying labour, the concept of decommodification refers to the process through which individual well-being is decoupled from labour market position. That is, these policies narrow the scope of the price mechanism and reduce the extent to which people’s standard of living depends on their market income. Similarly, climate policies can represent a state response to the negative effects of commodifying natural resources by loosening market values affixed to the environment (Gough, 2008: 327).¹

There are, of course, differences between the social risks managed by the two policy domains. As Gough notes, while social policy insures against risks that ‘are individually unpredictable but collectively predictable … those [managed by climate policy] are collectively unpredictable’ (2008: 327). Climate change risks are also more likely to be distant in time and less immediate than social policy risks (2008: 327). And social policy risks can typically be addressed (however imperfectly) at the national level, whereas climate change risks are global in origin and require supranational responses (2008: 327).

The theme of commodification has led Gough, among others (e.g. Burawoy, 2010), to use Karl Polanyi’s work to conceptually unite social and environmental challenges caused by commodification. Polanyi (1944) links the commodification of labour (which Esping-Andersen links to the welfare state) with the commodification of land (or the environment), arguing that both are ‘fictitious commodities’. Both are commodified as elements of the capitalist productive system, but neither is produced as a commodity. Gough (2008: 327) argues that this is the common thread between the two policy domains. Block (2008) also argues that Polanyi’s approach helps explain and unite the diverse array of environmental and social movements responding to the pressures of global capitalism.

The global financial crisis has led to a resurgence of work focused on links between ecological and financial crisis, and a number of prominent proposals for Keynesian-inspired policies aimed explicitly at both problems (Green New Deal Group, 2008; Kevin, 2009). More recently, the emerging debt crises resulting from the initial financial crisis have seen a re-engagement with an older political sociology literature on the fiscal crisis of the state (Schafer and Streeck, 2013). This recalls James O’Connor’s famous thesis, which also linked the problem of capitalist exploitation to environmental degradation. O’Connor (1998) identifies two systemic ‘contradictions of capitalism’, where the normal operation of capitalist markets erodes the conditions for their own success. The first contradiction involves the exploitation of labour by the owners of capital, with capitalists increasing exploitation to grow their profits (O’Connor, 1998: 160). The second contradiction occurs when capitalist production erodes its own ‘conditions of production’ by expending available resources and externalising private costs (O’Connor, 1998: 176). These conditions of production include the environment and urban infrastructure, as well as health and education systems necessary to sustain workers (O’Connor, 1998: 177). The more complex market systems become, the more the state is needed to provide social infrastructure and limit externalities. But this requires greater taxation and regulation, provoking resistance from business and thus a fiscal crisis of the state.

These similarities do not, however, remove all tensions between the two policy domains. As Fitzpatrick (1998: 9) contends, social policy has been subject to an ecological critique that emphasises its reliance on the ‘logic of industrialism’. This critique views social policy as the product of early industrial capitalism and its success as predicated on both high employment and open-ended economic growth (Fitzpatrick, 1998: 9). There is thus the potential for social policy, with its reliance on economic growth, to conflict with the goal of climate policies to achieve sustainable levels of growth (and consumption) in an ‘ecologically finite world’ (Dryzek, 2008: 334). Similarly, the politics of material compromise between classes may not be useful in a battle focused on the nature or quality of life (Habermas, 1981).

Nevertheless, these parallels between social policy and climate change mitigation policies have fuelled claims that both sets of policies could be applied to achieve complementary goals (Fitzpatrick, 1998). Although an ‘ecostate’ akin to the welfare state has yet to materialise, the limited empirical evidence suggests that countries with more extensive social policies have more successfully implemented climate change mitigation policies (e.g. Dryzek, 2008; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009). This suggests that there is potential in what Torres (2008) calls a ‘double-dividend’, in which social policy and climate policy are jointly directed at minimising social risks.

Exploring the political dynamics of climate and social policy

The potential parallels between the politics, and perhaps instruments, of climate and social policy suggest it is useful also to explore how the lessons of social policy development and the rise of the welfare state might inform our understanding of the contemporary politics of climate change. If there is an overlap in the origins, remedies and political constituencies surrounding the two issues, then the advanced literatures on partisan contestation, civic mobilisation and welfare state development may serve as an important source for analysis of climate change policy. This article confines its attention to one aspect of this broader approach; the potential overlap in constituencies for social and climate policy.

We look to the attitudes of the ‘climate constituency’, those who see climate policy as the most important electoral issue, because they are most likely to drive policy change through civil society. How do these voters view the traditional issues of social policy? Are they ambivalent, as the post-materialist thesis might suggest? If so, this would suggest support for Giddens’ (2009) consensual approach, which seeks to distance environmental policy from other policy issues. Even to the extent there is an overlap, is this merely the effect of party loyalties? As with other issues, are voters on the left more sensitive to environmental issues only because their leaders tend to be more vocal? To test these claims we examine the successful mobilisation of voters in the lead-up to the 2007 Australian election.

The politics of environmental policy: an Australian case study

Before turning to analyse the AES data, we briefly sketch major developments in Australian environmental policy to provide context. The environmental movement has had strong roots in Australia, with disputes in Tasmania over the damming of Lake Pedder and the Franklin River leading to high-profile direct action campaigns from the 1960s to the 1980s (Walker, 2002). The campaigns acted as a catalyst for the formation of the United Tasmania Group, the first green party in the world, the politicisation of environmental activists and, later, the Tasmanian Greens (Walker, 1989). Environment groups played a significant role in campaigning for the Labor Party in the 1983 election, with the Hawke Labor government then introducing federal legislation to prevent the damming of the Franklin River (Walker, 2002: 258).

Alongside this and other forest protests, the New Left also embraced environmental themes. Of particular interest, the Builders Labourers Federation in New South Wales, led by a group of New Left aligned unionists, forged innovative alliances with middle-class conservationists (Burgmann, 2000: 79). The union placed a series of ‘Green bans’ on development sites that threatened urban bush land and heritage, alongside bans to protect workers’ housing and promote other social issues (Burgmann et al., 2002: 7). This combination of environmental and social justice claims is credited with inspiring Petra Kelly in the formation of the German Greens (Burgmann, 2000: 82).

From the 1980s, the federal Labor government began investigating global warming (Hamilton, 2007). While economic development remained the overriding policy goal, a series of semi-corporatist mechanisms were used to engage environmentalists in a sustainability framework (Economou, 1993). Interest in environmentalism increased throughout the 1980s, culminating in the 1990 election (McAllister, 1994). Labor used a pro-environment message to attract preferences from those voting for post-materialist minor parties, allowing it to retain office despite trailing on the primary vote (McAllister and Bean, 1990). The same year, both major parties supported Australia committing in principle to achieving significant cuts in carbon emissions (Pearse, 2007: 127). However, with Paul Keating replacing Bob Hawke as Labor leader and prime minister, enthusiasm began to wane. By the mid-1990s, Australia struggled to meet its targets and, with the election of the Coalition in 1996, Australia’s position in international forums shifted, leading Australia to opt out of the Kyoto Protocol (Pearse, 2007: 75).

Climate policy was more contested during the Howard Coalition government. The Coalition espoused a national approach to environmental policy that used regulation to provide business with incentives to act sustainably (Papadakis and Grant, 2005: 33). In contrast, Labor promised to sign the Kyoto Protocol in a series of elections in the late 1990s and 2000s. By 2007, the policy division temporarily receded. The Coalition, while continuing to reject the Kyoto process, embraced an emissions trading scheme, a position similar to the Labor opposition. Despite this, published polls suggest Labor retained a strong lead on handling climate change among voters (Burgmann and Baer, 2012). However, the policy consensus cemented carbon pricing as the most appropriate policy response.

The passage of legislation was fiercely contested. An initial blueprint came from an inquiry, commissioned prior to Labor’s federal election, headed by economist Ross Garnaut. Labor’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was modelled on the report’s findings (Garnaut, 2008), however, substantial modifications were involved, particularly after negotiation with the conservative opposition. Despite these negotiations, the Coalition eventually opposed the legislation following a sudden leadership change and the bills failed to be passed by the parliament. Only after the 2010 election, which produced a hung parliament, did Labor revive its plans as a condition of its agreement with the Greens. The resulting Clean Energy Future (CEF) package combined elements of redistribution and direct investment with a carbon price (Australian Government, 2011). It was passed in 2011 and came into effect in 2012 (see Crowley, 2013: 375–8). However, following the election of the Coalition in 2013, much of the package has now been retrenched, including the carbon price.

In search of a constituency: voter support for social policy and climate change

Notwithstanding parallels between the CEF package and Australia’s targeted social policies, there is little evidence indicating whether or not voters would warm to an agenda that combines climate and social policy goals. Australian voters have increasingly prioritised the environment and climate change as election issues, but it is unclear whether this reflects post-materialist values or is compatible with the materialist electoral dynamics of social policy issues. To investigate the relationship between voter support for both environmental and climate change, we analyse results from the AES, which is a repeated cross-sectional survey that collects responses from about 2000 voters randomly sampled from the electoral roll after each federal election.

After the ‘green’ election of 1990, voter support for the environment declined until 1998. From this low point, Table 1 indicates voters increasingly prioritised environmental issues up to the 2007 election.² The table shows the portion of AES respondents who selected the environment or global warming as the most important issue in each federal election from 1990. It shows support peaked at 14.5 per cent of respondents in 2007, before slowly declining to 8.3 per cent in 2013.³ Although indicative of a broad trend, this data should be read with some qualifications in mind. This time series has included ‘global warming’ as a response category from 2007, with earlier years asking only about ‘the environment’. This data also does not capture the strength of attitudes. And, this series is only available since 1990, although this is less of an issue as support for the environment reached high levels in this election (Bean et al., 1990). Still, voter support for environmental issues was historically high at the 2007 election.

Table 1.

Proportion of Australian voters prioritising environmental issues (%).

	1990*	1993^	1996^	1998**	2001**	2004**	2007^^	2010^^	2013^^^
Global warming or environment top issue	10.3	4.2	5.1	2.9	3.7	5.5	14.5	11.9	8.3

Question does not refer to specific period.

Question refers to last 12 months.

Question refers to election campaign.

Question refers to election campaign and includes both ‘the environment’ and ‘global warming’ as response categories.

^^^

Figure includes ‘the environment’ and ‘global warming’ categories. However, question also refers to ‘the carbon tax’. Initial analysis suggests this includes respondents both supportive of and opposed to the carbon tax.

Source: McAllister et al. (1990, 2011); Jones et al. (1993, 1996); Bean et al. 1998, 2001, 2008, 2014); Gibson et al. (2004).

To examine whether this climate constituency prioritises both social policy and climate mitigation policy, we compare responses using AES data from 2007. Our analysis focuses on this election because of the peak of interest and because of the record level of civil society mobilisation around the environment (Rosewarne et al., 2013: 50). In comparing voter attitudes, we analyse how respondents answered three questions. The first two capture voter attitudes to social policy. The first question asks whether respondents support redistributing income and wealth. We selected this question to examine the link between support for targeted social provision, the dominant model in Australia (Wilson et al., 2009), and prioritising climate change. The second question asks whether respondents would prefer increased social spending on programs like Medicare and public education or tax cuts. It has been selected to test whether voter support for expansions of universal social provision, which decommodify social life, is linked to climate change attitudes. The third question asks respondents to select the issue that they prioritised during the election campaign from a list that included the environment and global warming. We combine these two responses given both an overlap in subject (global warming being an environmental issue) and a similarity in respondents. For ease of interpretation, separate binary dummy variables were developed for the pro-spending, pro-redistribution, and global warming responses (respectively).

Table 2 presents the cross-tabulations of the two dummy variables for social policy attitudes with prioritising global warming at the 2007 election.⁴ It shows that 62 percent of respondents who prioritised environmental and climate action also supported increased social spending, whereas only 44 per cent of those who did not prioritise action on global warming also supported increased social spending. The table also reveals a weaker relationship with attitudes to redistribution (56 percent to 50 percent), although Chi-square tests confirm both results are statistically significant. So, this initial analysis suggests the core constituency in favour of climate action also prioritises progressive social policy.

Table 2.

Cross-tabulation of voter priorities for social spending and climate change at the 2007 election.

	Top issue environment or global warming				Sample average
	Yes		No		Sample average
	%	n	%	n	%
Pro-spending*	62	166	44	660	53
Yes
No	38	100	56	824	47
Total	100	266	100	1,484	100
Pro-redistribution**	56	150	50	746	50
Yes
No	44	116	50	731	50
Total	100	266	100	1,477	100

n = 1750 respondents. These results are significant at p ⩿ 0.01 level.

n = 1743 respondents. These results are significant at p < 0.05 level.

Source: Bean et al. (2008).

Who is the emerging constituency?

The emergence of this constituency has several possible explanations. That voters who prioritised environmental action were more positively inclined towards social policy is suggestive of a link between post-materialist environmental politics and the materialist politics of the welfare state. Alternatively, the association between attitudes to climate change and social policy might stem from a common cause, the partisan nature of politics. Further analysis is thus required. The latter explanation receives some support from the politics of the 2007 election. The Labor Party, the party most responsible for developing Australia’s welfare state, was also most closely identified with climate and environmental action. The Greens, the party most identified with environmental issues, campaigned in favour of expanding public services funded by higher taxes at the election (Australian Greens, 2007). Thus, at an institutional level, partisanship reinforces the overlap between environmental and welfare state attitudes.

Partisanship can be an important influence on political behaviour and voter attitudes may reflect the platforms of the parties they identify with (see Campbell et al., 1960; Duverger, 1954; Spies-Butcher, 2012). There is evidence that attitudes to climate change are divided along party lines, both among candidates and the public (Tranter, 2013). As Table 3 shows, Labor and Green partisans favoured social spending and redistribution compared to other voters. Green partisans were almost four times more likely than Labor partisans to select global warming or the environment as their top policy priority at the 2007 election. To some extent, these results reflect the political salience of industrial relations policy. Industrial relations policy was a major issue of this election, with several prominent campaigns targeting the Howard government’s Work Choices legislation (Wilson and Spies-Butcher, 2011). The priorities of Labor and Green partisans reflected those of the party they identified with; Labor partisans prioritised industrial relations policy, whereas Green partisans prioritised the environment and global warming.⁵ As well as reflecting partisanship, these competing policies may have reinforced support for both parties, with those prioritising climate change identifying with the Greens and those prioritising industrial relations policy identifying with Labor.

Table 3.

Priorities for social spending, redistribution and global warming (and environment) at the 2007 election by partisanship and post-materialist values (%)*.

	Labor identifiers	Green identifiers	Post-materialists^	All voters
Global warming and environment top issue (n = 1786)	16	60*	33*	15
Pro social spending (n = 1735)	58*	68*	70*	53
Pro-redistribution (n = 1726)	65*	74*	67*	50

Chi-square tests confirmed that these results are statistically significant; p< 0.01.

See Table A1 for description.

Source: Bean et al. (2008).

Alongside partisanship, post-materialist values are also likely to influence attitudes to the environment. Table 3 reports the same three results for post-materialist voters. Post-materialism is gauged by applying Tranter’s (2012) three-point post-materialist scale.⁶ Results confirm that post-materialists were more likely to prioritise the environment and global warming, although less than Green partisans. Perhaps more surprisingly, post-materialists were also much more sympathetic to the traditional class issues of social spending and redistribution. Indeed, post-materialists supported social spending more than either Green or Labor partisans, and supported redistribution modestly less than Green partisans and more than Labor partisans. This may suggest a broader realignment of materialist and post-materialist politics, consistent with a growing relationship between environmental and welfare state attitudes.

We have conducted multivariate analysis using AES data from 2007 to test whether the relationship between attitudes towards climate change and social policy still holds when controlling for the influence of partisanship and post-materialism. We developed a series of binary logistic regression models. Non-responses and missing data were excluded from the analysis. The binary dummy variable for prioritising global warming was selected as the dependent variable.⁷ The models thus present the odds of respondents choosing global warming or the environment as their top priority over the odds of them not choosing either option as their top priority.

We specified the regression models using four blocks of independent variables, drawing on several used by Tranter (2013) in his analysis of environmental attitudes (see Table A1).⁸ The first block tests only for the two welfare state variables, testing the direct relationship between these attitudes and prioritising environmental action. The ‘Pro-spending’ variable reports respondents’ responses to the question on taxes versus social spending. The ‘Pro-redistribution’ variable records respondents’ responses towards redistributing wealth and income to ordinary working people.⁹ The second block also controls for respondents’ demographic characteristics. These characteristics include the sex, age, income and education of respondents. By placing these variables in the model, we test whether the relationship between pro-environment and pro-welfare attitudes is an artifact of demography and material wealth.

The third block adds political identification. The left–right scale gauges where voters place themselves on a 11-point left-wing to right-wing scale. We include those who reported identifying with Labor or the Greens to control for the potential effect of partisanship on voter attitudes. And we included whether respondents belonged to a union, due to the strong links between unions and Labor, as well as the importance of Work Choices at the 2007 election. The final block of independent variables consists of attitudinal variables. This includes the post-materialist variable already described. We also include whether respondents identify as religious, since post-materialism is argued to have coincided with increasing secularisation (Inglehart, 1997). The number of blocks of independent variables used in the regression models increases sequentially, so Model 1 only included the first block and Model 4 included all four blocks.

Overall, the complete model (Model 4) had modest but respectable explanatory power for this kind of social attitudes data, with a Nagelkerke R-square of 0.19. It shows a limited statistical relationship for education, which is significant only in the second model, but not for any of the other demographic variables. The model confirms that there is a strong statistical relationship between prioritising the environment and global warming and supporting either Labor or the Greens. The larger odds ratio for Green compared to Labor partisans confirms our earlier finding. However, when controlling for left-party partisanship and the other independent variables in the model, the left–right self-identification of respondents did not reach statistical significance, while union members were less likely to prioritise global warming or the environment. As anticipated, there are also strong statistical relationships between the post-materialist variables and prioritising the environment and climate change. Non-religious respondents were more likely to prioritise the environment, as were respondents with higher scores on the post-materialist index. The pro-spending variable is significant in all models. While the pro-redistribution variable did show a relationship in cross-tabulations, this is absent in all the models presented. Indeed, in Model 3 and Model 4, the B value falls below 1, suggesting any relationship is negative. This likely reflects the effect of partisanship, which is a powerful predictor of distributional attitudes.

The results reported in Table 4 suggest that attitudes to taxing and spending remain independently related to attitudes to the environment. While Green and Labor partisans were more likely to both favour social spending and prioritise the environment, our analysis suggests that those Green and Labor partisans who favour social spending are even more likely to prioritise the environment than are their fellow partisans who do not. This suggests that the association between pro-welfare and pro-environment attitudes is not solely the product of party advocacy. It is also interesting for understanding the constituencies of both Labor and the Greens. Our findings complicate a simple reading of the post-materialist thesis. While this thesis anticipates that voters with post-materialist attitudes would be more likely to prioritise environmental issues (as our model confirms), it would also expect that those Labor and Green supporters who prioritise the environment have less predictable attitudes to materialist issues like tax and social spending than other Labor and Green supporters who may have a more broadly social democratic value set. Yet, among left-party partisans, strong environmental attitudes are more often combined with strong pro-welfare attitudes. Reinforcing the earlier findings, this suggests a potential realignment of post-materialist politics to coincide with traditional materialist divisions (see Spies-Butcher, 2012).

Table 4.

Logistic regression model for prioritising climate change in 2007.

Variable	Model 1: Welfare state	Model 2: Demographic	Model 3: Political ID	Model 4: Post-materialism
Environment or global warming top issue (dependent)
Support higher spending over tax cuts	2.106**	2.004**	1.421**	1.576**
Support redistribution of income and wealth	1.128	1.245	0.993	0.859
Male		0.901	1.050	0.865
Older		0.993	0.997	0.996
Higher individual income		1.000	1.000	1.007
University qualification		1.485*	1.222	1.034
Labor ID			2.086*	1.529*
Green ID			13.089**	10.509**
Left self-identification (11-point scale)			1.014	1.042
Union member			0.698*	0.693*
No religion				1.785**
Post-materialist				1.591**
Constant	0.109**	0.154**	0.099**	0.045**
Nagelkerke R-square	0.03	0.05	0.14	0.19
-2 log likelihood	1430.862	1301.060	1621.821	1056.554
N	1710	1541	1414	1401

These results are significant at p ⩿ 0.01 level.

These results are significant at p ⩿ 0.05 level.

This relationship is not repeated for views on redistribution. We do not have the space necessary to fully explore this here, but a few preliminary observations are justified. As we have noted, welfare state theorists have argued that the potential commonality between social and environmental policy is the desire to decommodify aspects of life. A preference for expanding the role of social policy is consistent with this. However, the welfare state is also associated with redistributing the spoils of growth. We might imagine that this aspect of social policy, while not inconsistent with the desire for decommodification, is less central to it. In other words, we suspect that these results indicate that the relationship between attitudes towards social spending and environmentalism primarily reflect a broad desire for decommodification and a politics of ‘well-being’, rather than a traditional left commitment to material equality. However, this should be qualified by the particular importance of industrial relations in the 2007 election, which may influence this result. If true, these findings have broader implications for political tactics and choice of policy instrument. If the core constituency of environmentalists favour decommodification, this potentially sits uneasily with policy instruments that seek to integrate the environment into the price mechanism.

Conclusion

It is becoming increasingly clear that climate change is a political challenge. Scientific and technological knowledge about the nature of the problem and potential technical solutions is increasingly robust. However, political action has remained relatively weak. An emerging literature on climate change politics has attempted to explain the inaction. While this literature is diverse, many significant contributors have emphasised the need to decouple climate action from traditional partisanships. This is in contrast to an alternative literature on the ‘twin’ or multiple crisis of capitalism, which has emphasised interconnections between financial and ecological crises following the global financial crisis and commonalities between social and climate policy.

This article has explored the potential relationships between attitudes to climate policy and the welfare state. It has argued that there are significant conceptual links between the two challenges and their potential solutions, although the issues also remain distinct. Given this overlap, the article focused on an empirical investigation of political attitudes. If issues of social and climate policy are conceptually similar, might citizens see these issues as related? To do this, we examined data from the AES for 2007. Our attention was on the core constituency of those committed to environmental action. It is important to note this constituency is not a voting majority. Rather, our focus reflects the view that this group is the most likely group to drive policy change within civil society.

Our results show that there may indeed be a strong overlap in preferences between those identifying global warming and the environment as important and those favouring greater social spending. In 2007, this relationship held even in regression modelling, which accounted for the impact of partisanship and post-material values, both themselves strong predictors of welfare state attitudes. Our analysis is only an initial test. However, these findings suggest further exploration of the changing dynamics of environmental, welfare state and post-materialist attitudes is useful.

These questions are significant. If those committed to environmental action are also those supportive of a larger welfare state, it suggests different political opportunities. There is a rich sociological literature on welfare state development that might inform our understanding of the political dynamics of climate policy, linking the success of climate initiatives to the broader success of social movements and partisan political actors. This is not to deny the importance of understanding the independent dynamics of climate change as a unique policy challenge, just as studies of the welfare state do not supplant studies of health policy or pension policy. Instead, it suggests that conceptualising climate change as distinct from claims for broader political economic transformations may be misguided. Given the much longer history of welfare state politics and of academic inquiry, it may offer a timelier approach to respond to what is clearly a pressing policy challenge.

Footnotes

Appendix 1

Variable	Description
Dependent variable
Environment or global warming top issue	Q: Which of these issues was most important to you and your family during the election campaign? (12 issues: global warming, taxation, education, unemployment, the environment, interest rates, industrial relations, health and Medicare, refugees and asylum seekers, the resources tax, population policy, management of the economy).
	Respondent selected ‘global warming’ or ‘the environment’ as their top priority
Independent variables
Block 1	Male respondent
Male	Male respondent
Older	Age in years (in years)
Higher individual income	Gross annual individual income (18-point scale)
University qualification	Completed a university degree (dummy)
Block 2	Belongs to a union (dummy)
Union member	Belongs to a union (dummy)
Labor ID	Identifies as Labor to the question ‘Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as Labor, Liberal, National or what?’ (dummy)
Green ID	Identifies as Green to the question ‘Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as Labor, Liberal, National or what?’ (dummy)
Left self-identification	Subjective 11-point right to left-wing scale; 0 is left-wing, 10 is right-wing
Block 3	Has no religion (dummy)
No religion	Has no religion (dummy)
Post-materialist	3-point scale was developed from the question: ‘Here is a list of four aims that different people would give priority to:
	1. Maintain order in the nation
	2. Give people more say in government decisions
	3. Fight rising prices
	4. Protect freedom of speech
	If you had to choose among these four aims, which would be your first choice? And, which would be your second?’ Options 2 and 4 are classified as post-materialist, whereas 1 and 3 are considered materialist (Inglehart, 1997). Post-materialists are coded as 3, mixed responses 2 and materialist responses 1 (Tranter, 2012).
Support higher spending over tax cuts	Respondent selected ‘mildly favours’ or ‘strongly favours’ an increase to social spending over tax cuts
Support redistribution of income and wealth	Respondent selected ‘strongly agrees’ or ‘agrees’ that the government should redistribute income

Funding

This research was assisted by an internal grant from Macquarie University.

Notes

Author biographies

Ben Spies-Butcher is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Macquarie University.

Adam Stebbing is a Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Macquarie University.

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