A quantitative analysis of politically right-leaning residents’ attitudes to climate assemblies and climate policy in rural England.

Coxcoon, Rachel and Willis, Rebecca and Folkard, Andrew and Tyfield, David (2025) A quantitative analysis of politically right-leaning residents’ attitudes to climate assemblies and climate policy in rural England. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This interdisciplinary thesis considers the views of English rural residents in climate policy-making, incorporating both spatial and ideological dimensions of identity. I ask how the perspectives of rural, politically right-leaning residents could be better incorporated in climate policy-making, and situate the research within ongoing tensions by highlighting the broken social contract whereby rural communities are exploited for climate solutions while neglected in policy support. After reviewing literature on political identities (populism, nationalism, and conservatism) and their interactions with rural concerns such as landscape, place attachment, and tradition, the thesis addresses three research questions. First, does political identity lead to differential rates of participation in Climate Assemblies and differences in attitudes towards their legitimacy? Second, how can resistance to rural climate policy initiatives be reliably measured? Third, what are the pathways by which political identity, populism, and rural identity shape resistance to rural climate policy in England? In addressing the first question, I use evidence from multiple Climate Assemblies and an original survey to demonstrate that political identity shapes willingness to participate, as well as views on process design, raising questions about assumed political neutrality in standard recruitment practice. I then develop a novel, psychometrically validated scale measuring Resistance to Rural Climate Initiatives (RRCI) and apply this in a Path Model to address the remaining research questions. This reveals divergent causal routes to policy resistance across party groups, repositioning Conservatism as a statistical centre-ground driven by protective rurality and national identity, and demonstrating that Reform UK resistance operates through a substantially different and more ideologically oppositional structure. By combining practitioner insight with robust quantitative methods, this thesis advances understanding of the political, cultural, and spatial barriers to inclusive climate policy-making in rural England.