In December 2022, gas prices across the European Union were the highest ever recorded. Between the second half of 2021 and the second half of 2022 they rose by an average of 70% across all 27 member states. Inflation in the EU had gone from 2.5% at the end of 2021 to 9.2%. Governments were improvising: price caps, one-off bonuses, windfall taxes, subsidies to industry.

That was the moment we chose to ask 11,020 people in seven countries a question that European politics keeps trying to avoid. Not “are you in favour of the green transition?” — almost everyone says yes to that. Instead: which transition, paid for by whom, with what happening to the people it hurts?

The design

We ran a conjoint experiment, embedded in a cross-national survey fielded in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Poland and the United Kingdom between 1 and 9 December 2022. Respondents were shown pairs of hypothetical government policy packages and asked to pick one. Each package varied on three dimensions at once:

  • Energy strategy — invest in renewables, keep relying on fossil fuels, or downscale production and consumption.
  • Social compensation — support for workers hit by the transition, cash transfers to low-income households, cash transfers to everyone, support for affected companies, or nothing.
  • Financing — a wealth tax, a carbon tax, more public debt, or cuts to social spending elsewhere.

The point of the design is that it forces trade-offs. You cannot say yes to everything. And because the packages are randomly assembled, we can isolate what each ingredient does to support, holding the rest constant.

Three things we found

First: social policy is not a distraction from climate policy. It is what makes climate policy popular. Investing in renewables raised support on its own, but it raised it considerably more when the package also included transfers to workers or to low-income households. The synergy runs one way only — attaching the same compensation to a fossil-fuel strategy did not help it, and in places made it slightly worse. Social protection is not a sweetener you can bolt onto anything. It works specifically as part of a transition story.

Second: how you pay for it matters as much as what you buy. The single most popular ingredient in the whole experiment was a wealth tax. The least popular was cutting social spending elsewhere. A carbon tax split the sample almost exactly down the middle. Support for affected companies — the instrument European governments reached for most readily during the crisis — actively reduced support for a package, everywhere except among business owners, managers and professionals.

Put the winning ingredients together and you get what the literature calls a just-transition package: renewables, plus support for those who lose out, paid for progressively. It was the most popular combination we tested. The growth-first package — fossil fuels, help for companies, financed by welfare cuts — was the least popular by a wide margin. Green growth, which swaps fossil fuels for renewables but keeps the corporate compensation and the spending cuts, did barely better.

One result genuinely surprised us. A post-growth package — downscaling production, a universal basic income, financed by taxing the rich — polled almost as well as the just-transition packages. European publics are markedly less allergic to degrowth than the political debate assumes, and markedly more allergic to techno-optimist laissez-faire.

Third, and this is the uncomfortable one: compensation does not reach the people who most need convincing. Production workers and the unemployed were the two groups indifferent to every energy strategy on offer — they did not prefer renewables, and offering them money barely changed that. Only means-tested transfers to low-income households moved production workers at all, and only slightly. Among people who specifically fear that climate policy will cost them their job, nothing worked: no energy option raised their support, and no compensation measure did either.

Meanwhile the groups most responsive to compensation were sociocultural workers and professionals — people who were already on board.

Why this is a problem, and for whom

The obvious political reading is that there is a latent majority for an ambitious, redistributive transition. That reading is correct and incomplete.

It is a majority that has to be assembled, and its natural architects are exactly the parties least able to assemble it. Left and centre-left voters respond strongly to the just-transition package. Right-wing voters do not respond to it at all — adding compensation does not move them. So the coalition has to be built on the left and in the centre. But the left’s own historic base, industrial workers who believe the transition is coming for their jobs, is the one group that redistribution does not reach.

That is not a messaging problem. It is a structural one. Fear of unemployment turns out to be a different kind of objection from fear of a higher energy bill, and only the second is answerable with a cheque.

Two instruments came closest to bridging the gap: a robust means-tested benefit, and a progressive wealth tax. Neither is currently on the European table.

The article is What kind of energy transition? Public opinion trade-offs between economic growth, ecological sustainability, and equity, written with Marcello Natili and Alessandro Pellegata, published open access in the European Journal of Political Research (DOI). Replication code and data are on the Harvard Dataverse.