Denial and distrust: explaining the partisan climate gap

Nowhere is the partisan politicization of science more pronounced than on the subject of climate change, with Republican and Democratic voters divided on whether climate change exists and how to address it. Existing research tends to explain the partisan climate gap through a process of manufactured doubt, with a network of corporate and conservative organizations using their considerable resources to spread denial about climate science among conservative and Republican voters. I argue that this explanation is incomplete and inconsistent with recent sociological research on scientific conflicts. I explore an alternative hypothesis for the partisan climate gap: distrust in science. I apply a Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analysis to a large non-probability sample of Democrats and Republicans (n = 1808) to examine the relative contributions of climate science denial and scientific distrust to the partisan climate gap. Results show that lower levels of trust in science among Republicans explain a larger amount of the partisan climate gap than does climate science denial, though the magnitude of the difference in relative contribution varies by specific policy. These findings suggest that understanding the partisan climate gap requires extending our view beyond the climate change countermovement and toward a broader examination of the anti-scientific dimensions of the US conservative movement. I conclude by discussing how focusing on distrust, in conjunction with science denial, can enrich the study of climate change and science communication.