Lost in the Green Transition: Local Collective Greenloss Identity, Anti-Climate Attitudes and Radical Right Support

forthcoming

"Tackling climate change and the rise of radical right support are two of today's biggest political challenges, often treated separately but deeply interconnected. Stringent climate policies face resistance from carbon-intensive communities, while the radical right performs well among these groups. Yet, the link between climate policy opposition and radical right support remains underexplored. Why do climate policy losers turn to the radical right? GREENLOSS bridges the gap between climate policy and radical right scholarships to provide a new theoretical framework behind anti-climate radical right behavior. It posits that carbon-intensive communities develop a strong place-based collective identity, shaped by actual and perceived material and symbolic losses due to the (threat of) fossil fuel industry closure or green regulations—termed ""greenloss"" identity, which radical right parties exploit. Using a mixed-methods approach, GREENLOSS examines how greenloss identity affects opposition to climate policies and support for radical right parties in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Poland. GREENLOSS will: 1) Identify the losers of climate policies by mapping their geographic and sectoral contexts, and analyze the formation and variation of their greenloss identity across industries and locations through focus groups and interviews, 2) Assess the impact of greenloss identity on opposition to climate policies and support for radical right parties using novel surveys and contextual data, 3) Analyze how radical right parties activate this greenloss identity in their rhetoric through computational text analysis of elite data and test which aspect(s) of this identity drive(s) support for climate policies with survey experiments. By revealing the interconnectedness between climate action and the rise of radical right support, GREENLOSS introduces a new interdisciplinary frontier on the electoral impacts of climate policy through a systematic and comprehensive approach."