It controls for education, sex, and age, and the variables are prepared equivalent to the respondent characteristics
Reporting summary
Our primary outcome variable measures the concern about the consequences of climate change and is thus climate change specific. However, the SOEP also elicits concerns about environmental protection, a broader concept encompassing various environmental issues, including climate change and biodiversity loss 1,28 . We re-run our analysis using environmental protection concerns as an alternative outcome. We find a statistically significant albeit slightly smaller effect of climate protests on concerns about environmental protection (Supplementary Table 9). In our preferred specification (Column (6)), climate protests significantly increase the probability that a respondent is concerned about environmental protection on average by 0.9 percentage points (p = 0.044) in the 14 days after a protest. Given the protest movement’s dominant focus on climate change embedded in a broader environmental discourse, this finding aligns with our expectations. It also highlights the strong but not perfect correlation between attitudes towards climate change and the environment 29 . These findings provide further evidence that concerns about climate change and the environment increase after climate protests. Further, we disaggregate the analysis and estimate the effects of each protest. Supplementary Fig. 6 displays the effect of individual climate protests on climate change concerns. While most protests yield positive coefficients, the statistical significance is sometimes reduced, not reaching the five percent significance level. This is likely due to the reduced number of observations at the protest level. Given this limitation regarding the sample sizes, protest-specific effects should be interpreted cautiously. As a general observation, we tend to observe larger positive coefficients for the first and last protests, potentially due to comparatively lower levels of concern before these protests took place (Fig. 1) in line with the aggregate finding concerning pre-protest concern levels (see below). (more…)