Who bears the costs of decarbonization—and who is blamed for such costs—has become a central cleavage in contemporary party competition. Building on research on “green backlash” and the populist radical right (PRR), Zach argues that sharp and uneven household energy price shocks create fertile ground for PRR entrepreneurs to frame the transition to renewable sources of energy as unfairly costly. He examines the United Kingdom’s 2021–2023 energy price surge and shows two linked patterns. First, using a new text measure applied to party communications in press releases and in YouTube videos, Zach documents explicit blame attribution of higher energy bills to Net Zero and climate-related policies. Second, using pre-shock geographic energy price vulnerability measured using administrative data on over 27 million household energy efficiency inspections, he leverages difference-in-differences and triple-differences designs to find that individuals more vulnerable to higher energy prices become more likely to support PRR parties. Further evidence using survey panel data suggests that voters indeed blamed the government’s environmental policies instead of the economy, implying that political support for a green transition hinges on insulating the most vulnerable households.
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Speaker bio: Zach Dickson is a Fellow in Quantitative Methods in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics, where he is also affiliated with the Data Science Institute, the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and the Public Opinion Analytics Lab.

His research lies at the intersection of political behaviour and political communication, with a particular focus on right-wing populism and climate politics. Using quantitative and causal inference methods, his current projects examine the distributive consequences of climate policies and the political effects of public service decline.

His work has been published in leading journals including Political Communication, Comparative Political Studies, and the American Political Science Review. His research has also been featured in outlets such as The Economist, The New Statesman, The Guardian, and Forbes, as well as in a range of research blogs.

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