Uyanga Turmunkh

Understanding the drivers of public support for climate policies is crucial for designing socially feasible policy packages. However, most large-scale public opinion surveys focus primarily on mitigation policies. Here, we combine two representative survey waves from nine European countries (n = 27,910) to directly compare determinants of public support for climate change mitigation versus adaptation measures. We find that respondents support both mitigation and adaptation as policy objectives, but support specific adaptation policies slightly more than specific mitigation measures. Moreover, support for the two is shaped by a different composition of individual characteristics and policy evaluations. While adaptation support is driven primarily by perceived effectiveness, mitigation support is mostly driven by cost salience and politicisation. Our results suggest a stark difference in how Europeans incorporate the costs and benefits of mitigation versus adaptation policies into their support, and suggest avenues for remedying this imbalance.

The feasibility of implementing climate policies relies on citizen support. While recent efforts have focused on shifting the attitudes of policy opponents, little is known about the middle group who neither reflexively endorse nor reject mitigation measures. Here, using a survey of climate policy preferences across 13 EU countries (n = 19,328) in 2024, we identify the ‘conditionals’—a crucial faction of moderates whose support shifts across 15 climate measures— and examine the factors influencing their choices and quantify their electoral impact. Conditionals constitute 33% of Europeans who are active voters for the dominant centrist and centre-right parties. The preferences of conditionals hinge upon specific policy instruments and the perceived cost–benefit balances but less on fixed ideology or demographics. The potential shift of conditionals plays a vital role in shaping overall patterns of public policy support and electoral outcomes. Our findings emphasize the visible benefits of strategic engagement with conditionals for climate policy success.

The European Union (EU) has adopted ambitious climate policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030. While technical, economic, and political feasibility have been widely analyzed, far less is known about a critical enabling factor: whether key societal actors perceive these targets as credible and achievable. In this study, we elicit probabilistic beliefs about future EU emission reductions from a sample of citizens designed to be representative across 12 EU member states and compare them with the expectations of climate policymakers and experts. Our findings reveal that all three groups anticipate substantial progress compared to current levels. At the same time, citizens are more skeptical about achieving the target and substantially more uncertain than elites, expecting, on average, a 43% reduction by 2030 compared to the EU’s 55% reference. Moreover, we identify a notable misalignment: elites tend to systematically underestimate public skepticism. This gap underscores the need to improve policy communication, directly address citizens’ concerns, and foster a shared understanding to enhance the perceived credibility and political sustainability of the EU’s climate goals.

The feasibility of implementing climate policies relies on citizen support. While recent efforts have focused on shifting the attitudes of policy opponents, little is known about the middle group who neither reflexively endorse nor reject mitigation measures. Using a survey of climate policy preferences across 13 EU countries (n=19,328) in 2024, we identify the ‘Conditionals’- a crucial faction of moderates whose support shifts across 15 climate measures, examine the factors influencing their choices and quantify their electoral impact. Conditionals constitute 33% of Europeans who are active voters for the dominant centrist and centre-right parties. Conditionals’ preferences hinge upon specific policy instruments and the perceived cost–benefit balances, but less on fixed ideology or demographics. The potential shift of Conditionals plays a vital role in shaping overall patterns of public policy support and electoral outcomes. Our findings emphasize the visible benefits of strategic engagement with conditionals for climate policy success.

We investigate the credibility of nonbinding preplay statements about cooperative behavior, using data from a high-stakes TV game show in which contestants play a variant on the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma. We depart from the conventional binary approach of classifying statements as promises or not, and propose a more fine-grained two-by-two typology inspired by the idea that lying aversion leads defectors to prefer statements that are malleable to ex-post interpretation as truths. Our empirical analysis shows that statements that carry an element of conditionality or implicitness are associated with a lower likelihood of cooperation, and confirms that malleability is a good criterion for judging the credibility of cheap talk. This paper was accepted by Elke Weber, judgment and decision making.

Decisions to trust in strategic situations involve ambiguity (unknown probabilities). Despite many theoretical studies on ambiguity in game theory, empirical studies have lagged behind due to a lack of measurement methods, where separating ambiguity attitudes from beliefs is crucial. Baillon et al. (Econometrica, 2018b) introduced a method that allows for such a separation for individual choice. We extend this method to strategic situations and apply it to the trust game, providing new insights. People’s ambiguity attitudes and beliefs both matter for their trust decisions. People who are more ambiguity averse decide to trust less, and people with more optimistic beliefs about others’ trustworthiness decide to trust more. However, people who are more a-insensitive (insufficient discrimination between different likelihood levels) are less likely to act upon their beliefs. Our measurement of beliefs, free from contamination by ambiguity attitudes, shows that traditional introspective trust survey measures capture trust in the commonly accepted sense of belief in trustworthiness of others. Further, trustworthy people also decide to trust more due to their beliefs that others are similar to themselves. This paper shows that applications of ambiguity theories to game theory can bring useful new empirical insights.