Matto Mildenberger
Biographic Data
| ID | 1015486 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matto Mildenberger |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matto |
| FAMILY NAME | Mildenberger |
| SIGNATURE | MILDENBERGER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5784-435X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 512 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
A megastudy of behavioral interventions to catalyze public, political, and financial climate advocacy
Addressing climate change depends on large-scale system changes, which require public advocacy. Here, we identified and tested 17 expert-crowdsourced theory-informed behavioral interventions designed to promote public, political, and financial advocacy in a large quota-matched sample of US residents (n = 31,324). The most consistently effective intervention emphasized both the collective efficacy and emotional benefits of climate action, increasi…
The Effect of Policy Traceability on Legislative Incentives
Theories of legislative politics have long emphasized how a policy's traceability—whether and how voters connect legislative action with policy effects—shapes political incentives to legislate. Douglas Arnold emphasized how the “nature of the causal chain that links a policy instrument with its policy effects” structures the logic of congressional action. Despite its prominence, this key theoretical claim has received little empirical attention. …
Public opinion foundations of the clean energy transition
Popular debates about political barriers to the clean energy transition increasingly acknowledge the mass public’s role, but often summarize its importance with amorphous concepts like ‘political’ or ‘public will.’ This essay clarifies how the public’s beliefs, preferences, and behaviors affect the clean energy transition through three channels: policymaker incentives, electoral selection, and technology adoption and siting. In turn, we consider …
Survey sampling in the Global South using Facebook advertisements
Survey research in the Global South has traditionally required large budgets and lengthy fieldwork. The expansion of digital connectivity presents an opportunity for researchers to engage global subject pools and study settings where in-person contact is challenging. This paper evaluates Facebook advertisements as a tool to recruit diverse survey samples in the Global South. Using Facebook’s advertising platform, we quota-sample respondents in Me…
Survey Sampling in the Global South Using Facebook Advertisements – Corrigendum
Confronting Our Common Enemy
Lazar and Wallace make a compelling case that, although climate disasters undercut democratic legitimacy, "authoritarianism is not the answer." The authors of this essay agree, but do not view regime type as the primary constraint on climate-policy outcomes. Here, the authors draw on research on political institutions and climate policy to highlight two overlooked features of the conversation. First, even if democracy is better on average in addr…
Unintended consequences of using maps to communicate sea-level rise
Conducting the Heavenly Chorus: Constituent Contact and Provoked Petitioning in Congress
Congress hears more and more from everyday citizens. How do modern Congressional offices use this information to represent their constituents? Drawing on original interviews and a survey of Congressional staff, we explore how representation works in practice when new data and tools, such as databases and downscaled public opinion polls, are available. In contrast with established theories that focus on responsiveness, we show that representation …
The Politics of Intersecting Crises: The Effect of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Climate Policy Preferences
Few contemporary crises have reshaped public policy as dramatically as the COVID-19 pandemic. In its shadow, policymakers have debated whether other pressing crises—including climate change—should be integrated into COVID-19 policy responses. Public support for such an approach is unclear: the COVID-19 crisis might eclipse public concern for other policy problems, or complementarities between COVID-19 and other issues could boost support for broa…
Limited evidence that carbon tax rebates have increased public support for carbon pricing
Limited impacts of carbon tax rebate programmes on public support for carbon pricing
Change in US state-level public opinion about climate change: 2008–2020
Public attitudes toward climate change influence climate and energy policies and guide individual mitigation and adaptation behaviors. Over the last decade, as scientific certainty about the causes and impacts of, and solutions to the climate crisis has increased, cities, states, and regions in the United States have pursued diverse policy strategies. Yet, our understanding of how Americans’ climate views are changing remains largely limited to n…
The role of rebates in public support for carbon taxes
Economists advocate carbon pricing as the primary tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, very few governments have adopted a carbon tax high enough to meet international emission targets. Political challenges may stem from a number of areas, including political mobilization by policy opponents, consumers’ willingness to pay and the regressivity of many carbon pricing schemes, which might be addressed through rebates. We use a novel car…
Hot dry days increase perceived experience with global warming
The development of climate institutions in the United States
Climate change poses an existential threat to our planet – but does it require wholesale reorganization of our political institutions? As diverse contributions to this special issue describe, countries have restructured government agencies or developed new institutions to oversee climate reforms. Yet, few such transformations have occurred in the United States, one of the world’s most important cases. Instead, US climate institutions emerged when…
Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics
A comparative examination of domestic climate politics that offers a theory for cross-national differences in domestic climate policymaking. Climate change threatens the planet, and yet policy responses have varied widely across nations. Some countries have undertaken ambitious programs to stave off climate disaster, others have done little, and still others have passed policies that were later rolled back. In this book, Matto Mildenberger opens …
Combining climate, economic, and social policy builds public support for climate action in the US
Despite the gravity of the climate threat, governments around the world have struggled to pass and implement climate policies. Today, politicians and advocates are championing a new idea: linking climate policy to other economic and social reforms. Will this approach generate greater public support for climate action? Here, we test this coalition-building strategy. Using two conjoint experiments on a representative sample of 2,476 Americans, we e…
Prisoners of the Wrong Dilemma: Why Distributive Conflict, Not Collective Action, Characterizes the Politics of Climate Change
Climate change policy is generally modeled as a global collective action problem structured by free-riding concerns. Drawing on quantitative data, archival work, and elite interviews, we review empirical support for this model and find that the evidence for its claims is weak relative to the theory’s pervasive influence. We find, first, that the strongest collective action claims appear empirically unsubstantiated in many important climate politi…
Carbon Captured - How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics
"Climate change is a defining issue of our time, posing immense social and economic threats to countries across the world. Yet, even though climate change will harm all countries, national policy responses have varied. Some countries have undertaken substantial national action while others have done little. That vexing variation in response is well known. But surprisingly, we still lack comparative theories to explain this variation in climate po…
Quota sampling using Facebook advertisements
Researchers in different social science disciplines have successfully used Facebook to recruit subjects for their studies. However, such convenience samples are not generally representative of the population. We developed and validated a new quota sampling method to recruit respondents using Facebook advertisements. Additionally, we published an R package to semi-automate this quota sampling process using the Facebook Marketing API. To test the m…
Wildfire Exposure Increases Pro-Environment Voting within Democratic but Not Republican Areas
One political barrier to climate reforms is the temporal mismatch between short-term policy costs and long-term policy benefits. Will public support for climate reforms increase as climate-related disasters make the short-term costs of inaction more salient? Leveraging variation in the timing of Californian wildfires, we evaluate how exposure to a climate-related hazard influences political behavior rather than self-reported attitudes or behavior…
How will climate change shape climate opinion
As climate change intensifies, global publics will experience more unusual weather and extreme weather events. How will individual experiences with these weather trends shape climate change beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors? In this article, we review 73 papers that have studied the relationship between climate change experiences and public opinion. Overall, we find mixed evidence that weather shapes climate opinions. Although there is some suppo…
Personalized risk messaging can reduce climate concerns
Beliefs about Climate Beliefs: The Importance of Second-Order Opinions for Climate Politics
When political action entails individual costs but group-contingent benefits, political participation may depend on an individual’s perceptions of others’ beliefs; yet detailed empirical attention to these second-order beliefs – beliefs about the beliefs of others – remains rare. We offer the first comprehensive examination of the distribution and content of second-order climate beliefs in the United States and China, drawing from six new opinion…
Legislative Staff and Representation in Congress
Legislative staff link Members of Congress and their constituents, theoretically facilitating democratic representation. Yet, little research has examined whether Congressional staff actually recognize the preferences of their Members' constituents. Using an original survey of senior US Congressional staffers, we show that staff systematically mis-estimate constituent opinions. We then evaluate the sources of these misperceptions, using observati…
Legislative Staff and Representation in Congress
Legislative staff link Members of Congress and their constituents, theoretically facilitating democratic representation. Yet, little research has examined whether Congressional staff actually recognize the preferences of their Members' constituents. Using an original survey of senior US Congressional staffers, we show that staff systematically mis-estimate constituent opinions. We then evaluate the sources of these misperceptions, using observati…
Prisoners of the Wrong Dilemma: Why Distributive Conflict, Not Collective Action, Characterizes the Politics of Climate Change
Climate change policy is generally modeled as a global collective action problem structured by free-riding concerns. Drawing on quantitative data, archival work, and elite interviews, we review empirical support for this model and find that the evidence for its claims is weak relative to the theory’s pervasive influence. We find, first, that the strongest collective action claims appear empirically unsubstantiated in many important climate politi…
Beliefs about Climate Beliefs: The Importance of Second-Order Opinions for Climate Politics
When political action entails individual costs but group-contingent benefits, political participation may depend on an individual’s perceptions of others’ beliefs; yet detailed empirical attention to these second-order beliefs – beliefs about the beliefs of others – remains rare. We offer the first comprehensive examination of the distribution and content of second-order climate beliefs in the United States and China, drawing from six new opinion…
Wildfire Exposure Increases Pro-Environment Voting within Democratic but Not Republican Areas
One political barrier to climate reforms is the temporal mismatch between short-term policy costs and long-term policy benefits. Will public support for climate reforms increase as climate-related disasters make the short-term costs of inaction more salient? Leveraging variation in the timing of Californian wildfires, we evaluate how exposure to a climate-related hazard influences political behavior rather than self-reported attitudes or behavior…
Quota sampling using Facebook advertisements
Researchers in different social science disciplines have successfully used Facebook to recruit subjects for their studies. However, such convenience samples are not generally representative of the population. We developed and validated a new quota sampling method to recruit respondents using Facebook advertisements. Additionally, we published an R package to semi-automate this quota sampling process using the Facebook Marketing API. To test the m…
Public opinion on climate change: Is there an economy-environment tradeoff
Does the state of the economy condition public concern for the environment? Scholars have long argued that environmental preferences decline during economic downturns as individuals prioritize short-term economic needs over longer-term environmental concerns. Yet, this assumption has rarely been subjected to rigorous empirical scrutiny at the individual level. The presumed link between economic and environmental preferences is revisited, using th…
A Complex Systems Approach to the Study of Ideology: Cognitive-Affective Structures and the Dynamics of Belief Systems
We propose a complex systems approach to the study of political belief systems, to overcome some of the fragmentation in the current scholarship on ideology. We review relevant work in psychology, sociology, and political science and identify major cleavages in the literature: the spatial vs. non-spatial divide (ideologies as reducible to a spatially organized set of dimensions vs. as complex conceptual structures) and the person-group problem (i…
Hot dry days increase perceived experience with global warming
Personalized risk messaging can reduce climate concerns
Conducting the Heavenly Chorus: Constituent Contact and Provoked Petitioning in Congress
Congress hears more and more from everyday citizens. How do modern Congressional offices use this information to represent their constituents? Drawing on original interviews and a survey of Congressional staff, we explore how representation works in practice when new data and tools, such as databases and downscaled public opinion polls, are available. In contrast with established theories that focus on responsiveness, we show that representation …
Survey sampling in the Global South using Facebook advertisements
Survey research in the Global South has traditionally required large budgets and lengthy fieldwork. The expansion of digital connectivity presents an opportunity for researchers to engage global subject pools and study settings where in-person contact is challenging. This paper evaluates Facebook advertisements as a tool to recruit diverse survey samples in the Global South. Using Facebook’s advertising platform, we quota-sample respondents in Me…
The Politics of Intersecting Crises: The Effect of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Climate Policy Preferences
Few contemporary crises have reshaped public policy as dramatically as the COVID-19 pandemic. In its shadow, policymakers have debated whether other pressing crises—including climate change—should be integrated into COVID-19 policy responses. Public support for such an approach is unclear: the COVID-19 crisis might eclipse public concern for other policy problems, or complementarities between COVID-19 and other issues could boost support for broa…
The development of climate institutions in the United States
Climate change poses an existential threat to our planet – but does it require wholesale reorganization of our political institutions? As diverse contributions to this special issue describe, countries have restructured government agencies or developed new institutions to oversee climate reforms. Yet, few such transformations have occurred in the United States, one of the world’s most important cases. Instead, US climate institutions emerged when…
Confronting Our Common Enemy
Lazar and Wallace make a compelling case that, although climate disasters undercut democratic legitimacy, "authoritarianism is not the answer." The authors of this essay agree, but do not view regime type as the primary constraint on climate-policy outcomes. Here, the authors draw on research on political institutions and climate policy to highlight two overlooked features of the conversation. First, even if democracy is better on average in addr…
Unintended consequences of using maps to communicate sea-level rise
A Complex Systems Approach to the Study of Ideology: Cognitive-Affective Structures and the Dynamics of Belief Systems
We propose a complex systems approach to the study of political belief systems, to overcome some of the fragmentation in the current scholarship on ideology. We review relevant work in psychology, sociology, and political science and identify major cleavages in the literature: the spatial vs. non-spatial divide (ideologies as reducible to a spatially organized set of dimensions vs. as complex conceptual structures) and the person-group problem (i…
Public opinion on climate change: Is there an economy-environment tradeoff
Does the state of the economy condition public concern for the environment? Scholars have long argued that environmental preferences decline during economic downturns as individuals prioritize short-term economic needs over longer-term environmental concerns. Yet, this assumption has rarely been subjected to rigorous empirical scrutiny at the individual level. The presumed link between economic and environmental preferences is revisited, using th…
The political logics of clean energy transitions
Technology costs and deployment rates, represented in experience curves, are typically seen as the main factors in the global clean energy transition from fossil fuels towards low-carbon energy sources. We argue that politics is the hidden dimension of technology experience curves, as it affects both costs and deployment. We draw from empirical analyses of diverse North American and European cases to describe patterns of political conflict surrou…
Convergence and Divergence in the Study of Ideology: A Critical Review
Dedicated research on ideology has proliferated over the last few decades. Many different disciplines and methodologies have sought to make a contribution, with the welcome consequence that specialist thinking about ideology is at a high-water mark of richness, diversity and theoretical sophistication. Yet this proliferation of research has fragmented the study of ideology by producing independent communities of scholars differentiated by geograp…
How will climate change shape climate opinion
As climate change intensifies, global publics will experience more unusual weather and extreme weather events. How will individual experiences with these weather trends shape climate change beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors? In this article, we review 73 papers that have studied the relationship between climate change experiences and public opinion. Overall, we find mixed evidence that weather shapes climate opinions. Although there is some suppo…
Personalized risk messaging can reduce climate concerns
Beliefs about Climate Beliefs: The Importance of Second-Order Opinions for Climate Politics
When political action entails individual costs but group-contingent benefits, political participation may depend on an individual’s perceptions of others’ beliefs; yet detailed empirical attention to these second-order beliefs – beliefs about the beliefs of others – remains rare. We offer the first comprehensive examination of the distribution and content of second-order climate beliefs in the United States and China, drawing from six new opinion…
Legislative Staff and Representation in Congress
Legislative staff link Members of Congress and their constituents, theoretically facilitating democratic representation. Yet, little research has examined whether Congressional staff actually recognize the preferences of their Members' constituents. Using an original survey of senior US Congressional staffers, we show that staff systematically mis-estimate constituent opinions. We then evaluate the sources of these misperceptions, using observati…
Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics
A comparative examination of domestic climate politics that offers a theory for cross-national differences in domestic climate policymaking. Climate change threatens the planet, and yet policy responses have varied widely across nations. Some countries have undertaken ambitious programs to stave off climate disaster, others have done little, and still others have passed policies that were later rolled back. In this book, Matto Mildenberger opens …
Combining climate, economic, and social policy builds public support for climate action in the US
Despite the gravity of the climate threat, governments around the world have struggled to pass and implement climate policies. Today, politicians and advocates are championing a new idea: linking climate policy to other economic and social reforms. Will this approach generate greater public support for climate action? Here, we test this coalition-building strategy. Using two conjoint experiments on a representative sample of 2,476 Americans, we e…
Prisoners of the Wrong Dilemma: Why Distributive Conflict, Not Collective Action, Characterizes the Politics of Climate Change
Climate change policy is generally modeled as a global collective action problem structured by free-riding concerns. Drawing on quantitative data, archival work, and elite interviews, we review empirical support for this model and find that the evidence for its claims is weak relative to the theory’s pervasive influence. We find, first, that the strongest collective action claims appear empirically unsubstantiated in many important climate politi…
Carbon Captured - How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics
"Climate change is a defining issue of our time, posing immense social and economic threats to countries across the world. Yet, even though climate change will harm all countries, national policy responses have varied. Some countries have undertaken substantial national action while others have done little. That vexing variation in response is well known. But surprisingly, we still lack comparative theories to explain this variation in climate po…
Quota sampling using Facebook advertisements
Researchers in different social science disciplines have successfully used Facebook to recruit subjects for their studies. However, such convenience samples are not generally representative of the population. We developed and validated a new quota sampling method to recruit respondents using Facebook advertisements. Additionally, we published an R package to semi-automate this quota sampling process using the Facebook Marketing API. To test the m…
Wildfire Exposure Increases Pro-Environment Voting within Democratic but Not Republican Areas
One political barrier to climate reforms is the temporal mismatch between short-term policy costs and long-term policy benefits. Will public support for climate reforms increase as climate-related disasters make the short-term costs of inaction more salient? Leveraging variation in the timing of Californian wildfires, we evaluate how exposure to a climate-related hazard influences political behavior rather than self-reported attitudes or behavior…
Hot dry days increase perceived experience with global warming
The development of climate institutions in the United States
Climate change poses an existential threat to our planet – but does it require wholesale reorganization of our political institutions? As diverse contributions to this special issue describe, countries have restructured government agencies or developed new institutions to oversee climate reforms. Yet, few such transformations have occurred in the United States, one of the world’s most important cases. Instead, US climate institutions emerged when…
Limited evidence that carbon tax rebates have increased public support for carbon pricing
Limited impacts of carbon tax rebate programmes on public support for carbon pricing
Change in US state-level public opinion about climate change: 2008–2020
Public attitudes toward climate change influence climate and energy policies and guide individual mitigation and adaptation behaviors. Over the last decade, as scientific certainty about the causes and impacts of, and solutions to the climate crisis has increased, cities, states, and regions in the United States have pursued diverse policy strategies. Yet, our understanding of how Americans’ climate views are changing remains largely limited to n…
The role of rebates in public support for carbon taxes
Economists advocate carbon pricing as the primary tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, very few governments have adopted a carbon tax high enough to meet international emission targets. Political challenges may stem from a number of areas, including political mobilization by policy opponents, consumers’ willingness to pay and the regressivity of many carbon pricing schemes, which might be addressed through rebates. We use a novel car…
Conducting the Heavenly Chorus: Constituent Contact and Provoked Petitioning in Congress
Congress hears more and more from everyday citizens. How do modern Congressional offices use this information to represent their constituents? Drawing on original interviews and a survey of Congressional staff, we explore how representation works in practice when new data and tools, such as databases and downscaled public opinion polls, are available. In contrast with established theories that focus on responsiveness, we show that representation …
The Politics of Intersecting Crises: The Effect of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Climate Policy Preferences
Few contemporary crises have reshaped public policy as dramatically as the COVID-19 pandemic. In its shadow, policymakers have debated whether other pressing crises—including climate change—should be integrated into COVID-19 policy responses. Public support for such an approach is unclear: the COVID-19 crisis might eclipse public concern for other policy problems, or complementarities between COVID-19 and other issues could boost support for broa…
Unintended consequences of using maps to communicate sea-level rise
The Effect of Policy Traceability on Legislative Incentives
Theories of legislative politics have long emphasized how a policy's traceability—whether and how voters connect legislative action with policy effects—shapes political incentives to legislate. Douglas Arnold emphasized how the “nature of the causal chain that links a policy instrument with its policy effects” structures the logic of congressional action. Despite its prominence, this key theoretical claim has received little empirical attention. …
Public opinion foundations of the clean energy transition
Popular debates about political barriers to the clean energy transition increasingly acknowledge the mass public’s role, but often summarize its importance with amorphous concepts like ‘political’ or ‘public will.’ This essay clarifies how the public’s beliefs, preferences, and behaviors affect the clean energy transition through three channels: policymaker incentives, electoral selection, and technology adoption and siting. In turn, we consider …
Political science (22 works) · Climate change (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · Economics (13 works) · Climate Change Communication and Perception (12 works) · Environmental Education and Sustainability (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Public opinion (7 works) · Business (6 works)