Ksenia Anisimova

Hard (coercive) climate policies (i.e., pricing and taxation, regulation, and phase-outs) are important to ambitious decarbonization, yet they impose costs that are private, immediate, and concentrated on identifiable target groups, while the benefits they produce are public, deferred, and dispersed across populations and generations. This asymmetry makes such policies particularly prone to public backlash: abrupt, forceful, reversal-oriented form of contestation that can stall, weaken, or roll back policies after adoption.

Despite its growing salience, backlash remains poorly understood. While recent studies provide insights into the nature of this phenomenon and describe its empirical manifestations, the literature still lacks systematic comparative evidence on how prevalent it actually is; the conditions producing it have rarely been examined as combinations spanning both policy content and policy context; the relationship between backlash and policy failure has been asserted more often than tested; and the policy experts’ perspective on what contestation is a problem of has been largely absent.

Against this background, the thesis asks: what conditions give rise to public backlash to adopted hard climate policies in OECD countries, and with what implications for climate policymaking? It aims to characterize the prevalence of backlash, explain the conditions under which it arises, evaluate its consequences for policy outcomes, and learn from how experts problematize conditions of contestation and what possible action points they put forward to help enhance policy viability.

To this end, the thesis analyses 50 hard climate policy packages across 21 OECD countries between 2009 and 2022, drawing on structured interviews with 62 policy experts. It combines media content analysis to map prevalence, fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to identify conditions, and structured comparative case analysis to evaluate policy implications, working from a defined policy population so as to avoid selecting on the outcome.

The findings are fourfold. Following the analysis, backlash is found to be the exception rather than the rule, occurring in roughly 12% of cases, clustering among carbon pricing and taxation policies and in the latter half of the study period, with no straightforward link to particular design features. It arises configurationally rather than from any single factor: a core combination of policy demandingness and unfairness, joined in different cases by socio-political polarization, low climate concern, or weak information provision. Backlash is also distinct from policy failure: the cases that fared best were not the least contested but those that adapted most effectively in response to contestation. Finally, treating experts as "problem brokers," the thesis distils a repertoire of action points in which problems rooted in policy design (e.g., policy unaffordability, ineffective redistribution, policy misinterpretation) admit direct intervention, while problems rooted in policy context (e.g., partisan capture, policy legitimacy deficit) call for strategic policy orientation.

The thesis makes three contributions. Theoretically, it advances backlash as a distinct, configurationally produced phenomenon with not only detrimental but also productive effects, since contestation can activate much-needed policy adaptability. Empirically, it establishes a systematic medium-N evidence base and a comparative baseline the field had lacked. In policy terms, it offers a diagnostic vocabulary and action point repertoire for helping design and implement climate policy prone to contention. Its central message is that backlash is less prevalent and more diverse in its implications than emblematic cases suggest, and that policymakers could prioritize focusing on policy viability through adaptability rather than focusing on backlash avoidance per se.