Beyond courts: Does strategic litigation affect climate change policy support?

Abstract

Strategic climate change litigation is a rising phenomenon that has attracted considerable academic interest. Still, limited understanding exists of the effects of strategic litigation cases outside the courtroom – more specifically, on whether strategic litigation can influence public attitudes on climate change policy. Based on the concept of legal cueing, we conduct a pre-registered vignette experiment with a quota-representative sample of UK citizens to study the impact of information on strategic climate change litigation on stated and revealed preferences for climate policy measures. We furthermore perform an exploratory analysis of participants’ demographic characteristics and their expressed sentiment towards a carbon tax. Overall, the experiment returns null results, suggesting no direct link between strategic climate litigation and policy attitudes in our experimental setup. We discuss how legal cues may affect attitudes in a more indirect and cumulative manner.