Impact of Political Views on Individual Responsibility Perceived Concerning Climate Change

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject Politics - Topic: International development, grade: 1,7, University of Bamberg, language: English, abstract: This research paper deals with the current issue of the global climate crisis and the personal responsibility to act against it. It investigates how the amount of the consumption of political news can help to gain a greater individual responsibility to try to reduce the impact of climate change. Accordingly, this research paper hypothesizes a positive relationship between political news consumption and the individual responsibility to climate change. Through applying multivariate OLS-regressions to a sample of German citizens of the European Social Survey dataset from 2016, the hypothesized relationship can also be observed empirically. A gap regarding the personal responsibility to climate change between people who do consume political news and people who ignore political news can be identified. Based on these results, clear policy implications can be developed to raise the amount of political news consumption for news ignorers to broaden the extent of an individual's responsibility to act against climate change and to develop remedies against this collective action problem.