AMERICAN POLITICS & PUBLIC POLICY WORKSHOP
Abstract: Insurance premiums represent the leading edge of the cost of climate change, in that they are the most visible cost of climate change that a politically powerful subgroup (homeowners) bear. Existing theory would indicate that price increases would lead to greater support for climate policies. However, I use panel data to show that insurance attitudes are changing economic behavior, but not climate attitudes. The balance of the paper assesses why a shift is not occurring despite the magnitude of the climate insurance shock. First, I outline a causal chain linking insurance shocks and changing attitudes. I use a survey (N=4,000) to test where this chain breaks down. I do so by measuring the degree to which individuals are perceiving the insurance crisis, attributing it to climate change, and connecting it to various climate policies. I find that respondents struggle to perceive that insurance rates are increasing and to connect the crisis to climate mitigation policies in particular, with partisan motivated reasoning evident on climate but not extreme weather attribution. Using MRP modeling, I estimate differentials in these factors at the insurance market level, finding that knowledge varies geographically but clusters regionally, and evidence of selective partisan reasoning across and within factors. I also use social media data from 3,000 public officials and 2.9 million news articles to explain why individuals aren’t receiving attribution information. This paper increases knowledge about the link between the insurance crisis and climate opinion attitudes while also shedding light on the causal chain linking gradual economic shocks and individual opinions.
Eric Scheuch is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science. His research focuses on climate change, public opinion, judicial politics, and the urban-rural political divide. His work has been published or is in press in Urban Affairs Review, American Politics Research, Energy Research and Social Science, Journal of Environmental Psychology, Climatic Change, Nature Social Science Communications, Current Opinion in the Behavioral Sciences, Global Environmental Psychology, and PLOS Climate. Starting June 2026, he will be the deputy director of experimental research at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
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