Conservative conservationists: reconciling conflicting identities on climate change

ABSTRACT

Identities – how individuals think about themselves in the social world – are powerful drivers of political attitudes and behaviors. On highly polarizing issues such as climate change, political identities are powerful predictors of attitudes, behaviors, and policy preferences. However, other, non-partisan identities are also relevant to climate change attitudes, particularly when the identity is threatened by climate change. What happens when an individual has two salient identities informing opposing attitudes on a political issue? This study leverages a unique sample of politically conservative members of an environmental conservation organization – “conservative conservationists” – to understand how people reconcile conflicting identities to form their environmental attitudes and behaviors. Using qualitative data from interviews (n = 25) and participant observation, I document four strategies that participants use to reconcile identity conflicts and form environmental attitudes: distancing oneself from one of the conflicting identities; increasing deliberate political information seeking; redefining conceptions of an issue to fit with both identities; and creating a new identity that merges the non-conflicting aspects of the two identities. This research has implications for both the theoretical study of how identities influence political behavior and practical efforts to build bipartisan agreement on climate change.

KEYWORDS:

• identity
• climate change
• identity conflict
• conservation‌
• environmental attitudes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Catalist and The Yuhas Consulting Group jointly developed a nationwide ideology model that is available to Catalist subscribers, including the National Audubon Society. The model provides an ideology score for each registered voter and unregistered Voting Age Person (VAP). The scores have a value between 0 and 100, with 0 being the most conservative and 100 being the most liberal.

2 It should be noted that the Catalist scores were used only for population identification and were not part of the data collection or analysis process.

3 Although there are aspects of fiscal conservatism that may conflict with many government climate policies, these participants felt that being supportive of addressing climate change conflicted with being a social conservative, but not a fiscal conservative. This may be due to the grouping of political issues and social identity that has emerged under the label of social conservatism (Hayward 2014).