Measuring global concern about climate change with a dynamic, group-level item response theory model

摘要: In November 2021, the world’s leaders will meet to update their commitments to addressing climate change. Scholars have extensively discussed the complex and thorny geopolitics of this convening, but the micro-foundations of those geopolitics are poorly understood. This is due to the patchy availability of survey data concerning climate change around the world. In this paper, we present a comprehensive dataset estimating concern about climate change in 164 countries around the world, on a common scale. We describe our dataset of responses to 134 questions from 101 surveys measuring concern about climate change between 1998 and 2020. We then develop a grouplevel item-response-theory model to aggregate these data into a single latent-variable estimate of concern about climate change and support for policy to address it in each country represented in our dataset. We present preliminary results from this model, which we validate by comparing the model outputs to cross-sections of our underlying data. The estimates we present have the potential to open exciting new avenues for deepening scholarly understanding of the drivers of climate concern around the world.