Research

This paper studies ecospirituality - spiritual views that people have about the natu- ral world. First, utilizing folklore data from around 1,000 pre-industrial societies, we present the first comprehensive global measurement of ecospirituality. Our analysis reveals systematic cultural variation: ecospirituality is most prevalent in South Amer- ica and least prevalent in Europe. Additionally, we find a strong negative correlation between ecospirituality and belief in high gods. Second, we study the potential im- pact of historical ecospirituality on current environmental attitudes. Combining data from the Integrated Values Survey with folklore, we find no statistically significant relationship between contemporary environmental attitudes and the prevalence of ecospirituality in the folklore of ones ancestors.

Why do climate attitudes vary across individuals and countries? This paper empirically tests a determinant of climate attitudes that follows directly from self-interest and utility maximization across the life cycle — life expectancy. While theoretical models suggest that longer life expectancy increases willingness to contribute to fight climate change, empirical evidence for this relationship remains scarce. Using survey data from more than 120,000 individuals in 122 countries and plausibly exogenous variation in life expectancy across gender-age-country cells, we find that individuals who can expect to live longer are more willing to contribute income to fight climate change. This relationship is stronger among individuals fromlow- and middle-income countries, those without children, and women. Overall, the mechanism analysis supports the interpretation that the effects are driven by intertemporal considerations. Our result is robust to a number of alternative specifications and controls as well as an instrumental variable strategy. This finding contributes to the broader understanding of how demographic and health dynamics shape climate attitudes.

While the recent rise of populism has led many scholars to study populism in the modern era, its long-run evolution remains underexplored. This paper analyzes German parliamentary speeches to study populism over the long run, covering the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) and the united Federal Republic (1991–today). We employ a tailored and validated machine learning model to measure populism and dissect it into anti-elitism and people-centrism. We find that in both republics, populism is similarly common, similarly distributed across the ideological spectrum, and increases over time. Moreover, in both states, left-wing parties were initially the most populist group but were eventually overtaken by right-wing parties. However, we find a difference in the form of populism: in the Weimar Republic, the increase in populism is driven by a surge in the anti-elitism of right-wing parties, while in the Federal Republic, it is due to a general rise in people-centrism.