Research Overview
My research examines how people experience climate change and how these experiences shape political attitudes and support for climate policy. I focus on the intersection of climate attitudes, political behavior, and climate policy, using comparative and multi-method approaches across the United States, Europe, and East & Southeast Asia.
My work is organized around three interconnected themes:
Climate Attitude
Explores how individuals perceive and emotionally respond to climate change, and how contextual factors shape their attitudes and sense of concern.
Political Behavior
Examines how climate-related experiences influence voting, policy preferences, and trust in government.
Climate Policy
Analyzes how governments and institutions respond to public climate concern through adaptation, mitigation, and policy innovation at national and local levels.
The central questions that guide my research are:
- When and how do personal experiences with climate-related disasters become politically salient?
- Why do some democracies advance ambitious climate policies while others lag behind?
- How do citizens evaluate fairness, responsibility, and distributional trade-offs in climate policy?
My work integrates survey analysis, quasi-experimental designs, cross-national datasets, meta-analysis, and policy evaluation to understand how climate risk perception translates into political action.
Book Project
Experiencing Climate Disasters and Shaping Climate Policy: The Role of Political Climate Concern
My book project develops the concept of political climate concern, which captures when climate risk becomes politically meaningful and translated into demands for government action. Drawing on meta-analysis, survey evidence, quasi-experimental designs, and structural equation modeling, the book shows that direct experience with climate-related disasters significantly heightens political climate concern. In turn, this heightened concern increases support for both tax-imposing policies (e.g., carbon taxes, fossil fuel restrictions) and government-spending approaches (e.g., renewable energy investment, R&D).
The manuscript contributes a general theoretical and empirical framework that explains how climate threat becomes politicized and why climate policy preferences vary across institutional and economic contexts.
Working Papers
Why Some Democracies Lag Behind: Political Climate Concern and National Climate Policy Performance
This study examines whether public political climate concern predicts national climate policy performance using CCPI (2020–2025), EM-DAT disaster data, and an original Political Climate Concern Index. Comparing the U.S., EU member states, South Korea, and Japan, the paper evaluates how polarization, experiential salience, and socioeconomic capacity shape cross-national differences in climate policy ambition and implementation. (Working paper; to be presented at MPSA 2026)
Two Paths to Climate Policy: Political Climate Concern and Personal Experience
Using structural equation modeling and quasi-experimental variation in disaster exposure, this paper shows that subjective perceptions of being personally affected significantly heighten political climate concern, which in turn drives support for regulatory and investment-oriented climate policies. (Manuscript under revision; Submitted to SSRN🌐; presented at APSA 2025)
Do Personal Experiences Underpin Perceived Climate Threat? A Systematic Review with a Meta-Analysis
This meta-analysis synthesizes evidence on how personal experience, political identity, environmental values, and scientific knowledge shape climate concern. The study provides a baseline effect size for understanding when climate threats become politically meaningful and how climate attitudes form across populations. (Manuscript under revision; Submitted to SSRN🌐; presented at SPSA 2025 Summer)
Projects in Progress
Climate Politics in East and Southeast Asia
I extend the theory of political climate concern to Korea, Japan, China, and Southeast Asia— regions facing severe climate impacts and diverse governance capacities, offering a comparative lens into how environmental risks become politicized under diverse institutional and cultural contexts.
Refining Political Climate Concern through Survey Experiments
A set of survey and framing experiments designed to identify the causal pathways linking disaster experience, political climate concern, and climate policy preferences. This project advances and refines the concept of political climate concern by testing how experiential cues and contextual information shape political judgments about climate governance.
Fairness and Distribution in Climate Governance
A comparative study examining how citizens evaluate distributional trade-offs, responsibility, and fairness in the design of climate mitigation and adaptation policies.