Politicians overestimate opposition to climate action, as well as how polarized the public is on the issue, according to a new study. The findings suggest that a “spiral of silence” may dampen politicians’ willingness to go to bat for climate policies that are actually quite popular.

Previous research has shown that members of the public tend to underestimate support for climate action among their fellow citizens. But less evidence is available about the perceptions of politicians, whom one might expect to be dialed in to the nuances of public opinion.

In the new study, researchers surveyed 100 members of the House of Commons in the United Kingdom, first asking about the politicians’ own support for four different climate policies: providing grants and loans to improve home energy efficiency; taxing consumer products according to their environmental impact; imposing a “frequent flyer tax” that increases the cost of air travel depending on how often people fly; and raising taxes on red meat and dairy products.

The politicians were then asked to estimate support and opposition for the home energy efficiency and consumer product tax policies among the general public, among voters of different parties, and among their fellow MPs. The researchers compared the answers with recent public polling results on the same policies.

The MPs underestimated public support for climate policies, pegging support for the product tax at 14.9 percentage points and for the energy efficiency subsidies at 7.1 percentage points less than poll results suggest.

They also overestimated public opposition by three-fold for the energy efficiency subsidies and almost two-fold for the consumer product tax.

“MPs who are personally less supportive tend to underestimate public support more, while even highly supportive MPs still underestimate on average,” the researchers write.

The MPs overestimated how far apart voters of different parties are on climate policy, judging a 25 percentage point difference between Labour and Conservative Party voters on support for the insulation and product tax policies when the actual spread is just 12 percent.

The politicians thought that Conservative voters in particular are much more likely to oppose climate action than these voters actually say they are.

MP perceptions of public attitudes shape their own choices as politicians. Individual MPs who thought public support for the consumer product tax was lower were also less willing to advocate for it publicly, regardless of their own stance on the issue. MPs who perceived the tax as less popular among fellow parliamentarians were also less willing to promote it, again regardless of their own opinions.

This is what’s known as a “spiral of silence,” in which the misperception that a policy or position is unpopular dampens an individual’s willingness to advocate for it.

For half of the MPs, the researchers presented information about public polling results on the first two policies before asking the politicians to gauge public support for the second two. They wondered if this information might cause the MPs to consider that climate policies in general might be more popular than they had assumed.

But this wasn’t the case. The intervention didn’t improve politicians’ estimation of public support for climate policies; neither did it increase their willingness to advocate for the policies in public or in Parliament – even among MPs who personally supported the policies.

“Together, these findings suggest that misperceptions of others’ preferences at the elite level within Parliament are structured in a way that may actively discourage climate leadership, by presenting public opinion on climate policy as both weaker and more polarised than it actually is,” the researchers write.

Source: Tanase L.-M. et al. “Perception gaps in the British Parliament reveal a possible pathway to stronger climate action.” Communications Sustainability 2026.

Image: Based on an image by Yutthana Gaetgeaw/iStock.com. ©Anthropocene Magazine.