Partisanship overcomes framing in shaping solar geoengineering perceptions: Evidence from a conjoint experiment
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1.
California Institute of Technology
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2.
University of Cambridge
Abstract
The discourse on solar geoengineering (SG) is evolving, yet public perceptions of SG as a climate change solution remain underexplored, especially in the polarized US political landscape. We examine the relative importance of different SG narratives—framed as complementary, substitutive, or posing a moral hazard—and partisan information sources in shaping public attitudes. Using a conjoint experiment with 2123 American voters, we find that partisan alignment with the information source plays a decisive role in shaping trust in the messenger and support for SG, overshadowing any impact of message framing. Both Democrats and Republicans are more likely to trust the messenger and support SG when the information comes from a copartisan source. However, despite these strong partisan influences, policy preferences remain consistent with ideological baselines. These findings highlight the importance of partisanship in shaping perceptions of emerging climate technologies such as SG, even in contexts of low public awareness, and underscore the challenges of depolarizing public discourse on climate change solutions.
Copyright and License
© The Author(s) 2025.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Acknowledgement
R.M.A. and B.M.'s work is supported by Caltech's Resnick Sustainability Institute. RD's work is supported by the Cambridge Arts, Humanities and Social Science (AHSS) Grants, Keynes Fund [JHVH] and the Bill & Melinda French Gates Foundation (OPP1144).
Data Availability
Upon publication, the code and data necessary to reproduce the results reported in this paper will be made available in a permanent and public data repository, subject to any limitations imposed by human subjects considerations.
Ethics
The data collection and analysis procedures were reviewed by Caltech’s Institutional Research Board and were ruled exempt (IRB 22-1220). Informed consent was obtained from all participants.
Supplemental Material
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Additional details
- Resnick Sustainability Institute
- University of Cambridge
- Keynes Fund
- JHVH
- Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
- OPP1144
- Accepted
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2025-03-13
- Caltech groups
- Resnick Sustainability Institute, Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS), Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS)
- Publication Status
- Published