From Attitudes to Action in Climate Politics

The "ATTCLIMPOLS: From Attitudes to Action in Climate Politics" project seeks to advance understanding of public support for climate policies and behaviours that can help mitigate anthropogenic environmental changes, with a particular emphasis on the social and political conditions under which citizens endorse climate-mitigation measures. To achieve this, it combines new data infrastructures with theory-driven research to produce actionable evidence for fairer, more effective climate governance and to strengthen citizen engagement throughout the ecological transition. ATTCLIMPOLS is an oriented research project aligned with Spain's Adaptation and Mitigation priority (Area 8) of the PEICTI 20242027. Its focus is on providing solutions to concrete challenges related to the societal and political implementation of climate change mitigation policies. The project builds directly on the previous ATTCLIMATE project, funded under the Strategic Projects Oriented Toward the Ecological and Digital Transition, which ran from December 2022 to July 2025 and was co-directed by Marc Guinjoan (UAB) and Toni Rodon (UPF). ATTCLIMATE far exceeded expectations by fielding four nationally representative panel waves and generating multiple publications and new lines of inquiry. This strong foundation enables ATTCLIMPOLS to extend the panel to seven waves and deepen the analysis of how attitudes and policy support evolve over time. ATTCLIMPOLS will deliver five interconnected contributions. RL1 and RL2 focus on improving data and measurement of climate change attitudes, while RL3 to RL5 aim to generate new substantive knowledge on behaviour, preferences, and policy acceptance. RL1 will develop a harmonised, longitudinal, cross-national database on climate attitudes by integrating diverse surveys, expanding coverage to underrepresented regions, and estimating comparable country-year latent indicators with transparent documentation for open reuse. RL2 will expand the Spanish ATTCLIMATE panel with three additional waves (N=4,000 each), creating the most extensive longitudinal dataset on climate attitudes in Spain and in the world, and enabling fine-grained within-individual analyses. These waves will also include original questions and embedded experiments for research purposes. The complete dataset will be made publicly available at the end of the project. RL3 will quantify the value citizens assign to climate action using conjoint and complementary pricing strategies to estimate willingness to trade income for cleaner air, greener urban design, and better adaptation. RL4 will exploit the panel's repeated measures to track how economic shocks, ideological and partisan realignments, and gender-generational dynamics reshape beliefs and support for mitigation. Finally, RL5 will examine the political consequences of implementing specific climate interventions, such as door-to-door waste collection schemes at the local level, combining staggered difference-in-differences designs with individual-level mechanisms captured through targeted surveys. Overall, ATTCLIMPOLS will deliver an international database and a seven-wave national panel as open resources, alongside high-impact studies that inform policy design. By combining methodological rigor with policy relevance, and introducing innovative data infrastructures and analytical strategies, the project will maximize scientific impact and strengthen the social feasibility of the green transition.