Australian voters’ attitudes to climate action and their social-political determinants

preference and educational attainment. For climate policy in Australia, the key implication of the present research is that Australian political leaders could pursue a climate action agenda knowing that the majority of the voting population is likely to broadly support this course of action, regardless of which party is in power. Our findings suggest that support for strong pol- icy action may be limited by voters’ preparedness to incur personal costs, especially among conservative voters. This highlights the importance of the stated positions on climate action of conservative political actors, as political leadership is an important influence on public opinion [39, 42]. Divisive politics that promote climate delay, familiar in the Australian political con- text [1, 6], may have a limited shelf life as the majority of voters, at the aggregate national level, accept the need for climate action. Supporting information S1 File. (PDF) S1 Data. (XLSX) Acknowledgments We express our gratitude to Professor Ian McAllister of the Australian National University for helpful comments on the survey questions, and generous support for the inclusion of our ques- tions alongside the Australian Election Study. We are also grateful to Anna Lethborg and Charles Dove of the Social Research Centre for their assistance with designing and implement- ing our questions. Author Contributions Conceptualization: R. M. Colvin, Frank Jotzo. Formal analysis: R. M. Colvin. Funding acquisition: Frank Jotzo. Methodology: R. M. Colvin, Frank Jotzo. Writing – original draft: R. M. Colvin, Frank Jotzo.

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