Backlash to Climate Policy

(cid:129)
James J. Patterson*

Abstract

Hard climate policy (e.g., regulation, taxes/pricing, phaseouts) is needed to meet ambi-
tious climate targets, but when such policy is introduced, it can sometimes trigger back-
lash. Backlash involves an abrupt and forceful negative reaction by a signiﬁcant number
of actors seeking to reverse a policy, often through extraordinary means that transgress
established procedures and norms. Yet, explanations of policy backlash remain nascent
and fragmented. I synthesize insights from within and beyond climate politics to argue
that contested legitimacy is central to climate policy backlash, which provokes attempts
toward delegitimation. I develop a conceptual pathway to explain the occurrence of cli-
mate policy backlash and generate hypotheses about how practices of delegitimation
occur, and their effects. This contributes to explaining why backlash occurs, highlighting
ideational factors alongside interests and institutions. Overall, I suggest the need for a
contextually embedded approach to understanding the volatile dynamics of backlash,
bringing political sociology into conversation with political economy.

Hard climate policy (e.g., regulation, taxes/pricing, industry phaseouts) is
needed to meet ambitious climate targets and stimulate rapid decarbonization,
but when such policy is introduced, it can sometimes trigger backlash. Backlash
can lead to policy regression and cast doubt on the prospects for future action.
Examples include the acrimonious removal of a national carbon pricing scheme
in Australia in 2014 (Crowley 2017); the repeal of subnational climate policy in
Alberta and Ontario in Canada in 2018–2019 (Macneil 2020; Raymond 2020);
and the Yellow Vests protests in France in 2018–2019, linked to a fuel tax
change (Kinniburgh 2019). These experiences raise questions about when and
why climate policy may be rejected by policy recipients and how that outcome
can be avoided.

* This research was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s
Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement 949332). I am grateful for
feedback on earlier versions of this article from Frank Biermann, as well as from Diarmuid
Torney and Johannes Müller Gómez at the ECPR 2021 General Conference. The ideas in this
article beneﬁted from ongoing discussion with Ksenia Anisimova, Jasmin Logg-Scarvell, and
Cille Kaiser. I am thankful to three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive
feedback and to the current and former editors of Global Environmental Politics and managing
editor Susan Altman for their support and guidance.

Global Environmental Politics 23:1, February 2023, https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00684
© 2022 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International (CC BY 4.0) license.

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James J. Patterson

(cid:129) 69

Backlash refers to an abrupt and forceful negative reaction by a signiﬁcant
number of actors within a political community seeking to reverse a political
development (Alter and Zürn 2020; Madsen et al. 2018; Patashnik 2019).1 In
other words, it is a volatile and largely unexpected pushback that can involve
various actors (e.g., mass publics, political elites, organized interests). Policy
backlash is an aspect of enactment politics2 broadly conceived (Hacker and
Pierson 2019), which centers on counteraction to policy action. It challenges
policy substance and threatens the authority of policy proponents, transgressing
routine procedures and norms of opposition (Alter and Zürn 2020; Madsen
et al. 2018; Patashnik 2019). For example, while disagreement over policy is
entirely normal, it is typically expressed through broadly shared procedures
and norms of democratic decision-making within an accepted framework of
public authority.3 Backlash, on the other hand, contests the very legitimacy of
policy action, involving particularly strong and volatile grievances. Importantly,
as a counter-action, backlash is an event or process rather than an outcome. It is
therefore not synonymous with policy reversal per se, even though policy rever-
sal or other negative consequences for policy stability and development can
result.

Policy backlash has been observed in a range of domains, including cli-
mate change. However, explanations of the phenomenon remain nascent and
fragmented. Emerging scholarship on backlash politics proceeds along varying
lines, proposing explanations such as escalating negative feedback (Patashnik
2019) or contentious politics (Alter and Zürn 2020). Within climate politics,
scholars have explored diverse forms of contestation in climate policy making
to explain patterns of action/nonaction. For example, some have emphasized
the material drivers of countermobilization to climate policy proposals within
institutional politics (Mildenberger 2020; Skocpol 2013). Others have studied
retrospective voting (Stokes 2016) or social mobilization (McAdam and Boudet
2012) in response to infrastructure siting. Still others have warned about the
possibility of backlash to regulatory climate policy ( Jordan and Matt 2014)
and have explored right-wing populist opposition to climate action (Lockwood
2018). But so far, these lines of thinking remain disparate, lacking a shared
grounding on which to study and compare varied manifestations of policy
backlash.

In this article, I synthesize insights from within and beyond climate poli-
tics to argue that contested legitimacy is central to climate policy backlash.
While there are antecedents to this idea within current literature (Alter and
Zürn 2020; Madsen et al. 2018; Patashnik 2019), the role of contested

1. For example, Patashnik (2019, 50) describes this as like “slamming on the brakes” of a policy.
2. By this, I refer to the politics of policy introduction, including policy adoption and

establishment.

3. For example, “a person might think that a law or a decision is misguided, or inequitable, or
even unjust, but still accept it as legitimate—for example, on the ground that it was duly
enacted by a democratically-elected legislature” (Bodansky 1999, 602).

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70 (cid:129) Backlash to Climate Policy

legitimacy has so far not been foregrounded or elaborated. Yet, doing so helps
to bring together material and interpretive drivers of counteraction, with moral
judgments made by involved actors that give backlash particular escalatory force
and volatility. Hence, contested legitimacy can help to explain why backlash
occurs and often carries profound threat to its targets. Furthermore, I argue that
this leads challengers to attempt to delegitimate a policy action in response. Con-
tested legitimacy arises because a hard policy will, implicitly or explicitly, imple-
ment a new authoritative relation between the state and policy recipients, which
must be widely accepted as legitimate to become normalized and durable. But
such action may be opposed, either due to disagreement about the policy while
accepting the right of the state to take such action (“ordinary opposition”) or
due to more fundamental contestation over the very legitimacy of the state to
take such action at all. This latter case gives rise to grievance, which can drive
backlash.

The article proceeds as follows. First, I survey the difﬁcult enactment pol-
itics of climate action and the issue of counteraction. Second, I combine insights
about backlash politics to develop a conceptual pathway of climate policy back-
lash. Third, I examine the central role of contested legitimacy and how it triggers
attempts at delegitimation that animate backlash, then distill a range of hypoth-
eses to guide future empirical study. Thereby, the article has a hypothesis-
generating focus; it contributes to explaining why climate policy backlash
occurs, suggesting an ultimately ideational approach, which also has potential
wider relevance beyond climate politics.

Counteraction to Climate Policy

Enactment of domestic climate policy involves many challenges. At the outset,
policy must grapple with dilemmas that defy simple resolution, such as asym-
metric distributions of costs and beneﬁts for different actors and over time, and
disagreement over the priority of climate action and willingness to take on costs
(Bernauer 2013; Jordan et al. 2010). Preferences for climate action can be
ambiguous and unstable. Aggregate stated preferences might not guarantee sup-
port for speciﬁc policies when they are introduced as costs become salient or
opponents mobilize against a policy. Preferences can also cut across left–right
political cleavages, fragmenting support among institutionalized actors
(Mildenberger 2020). Climate policies also interact with wider policy and soci-
etal issues that may have higher public salience (Lipscy 2018, 4).

The attributes of speciﬁc climate policies also inﬂuence enactment.
Scholars distinguish policy attributes such as instrument type, cost (level and
distribution), and ambition (Mildenberger 2020; Sewerin et al. 2020). A key
feature is the degree of coerciveness for policy recipients ( Jordan and Matt
2014; Rhodes et al. 2017). Hard climate policy seeks to compel a particular
action or behavior backed by threat of sanction or force (Schulze 2021). This
could include paying certain taxes/charges, changing behavior in some way,

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James J. Patterson

(cid:129) 71

or stopping certain forms of economic activity. Such policy is “especially chal-
lenging politically” (Harrison and Sundstrom 2010, 8) because it involves the
politics of distributing costs rather than beneﬁts (Jordan and Matt 2014), and
coerciveness may create risks for political legitimacy (Salamon 2001, 1651).

Nevertheless, patterns of backlash to climate policy are confounding. On
one hand, recent years have seen the nationwide Yellow Vests protests in France
(Kinniburgh 2019), policy rollbacks in Australia (Crowley 2017), policy roll-
backs and provincial government court challenges against national climate pol-
icy in some Canadian provinces (Macneil 2020; Raymond 2020), and rollbacks
of environmental policy in the United States under the Trump administration
(Mildenberger 2021). Even Germany, famous for its multidecadal energy tran-
sition, struggles with rapidly moving away from coal due to fear of triggering
resistance (Brauers et al. 2020). On the other hand, the United Kingdom has
had a relatively stable climate policy framework over time (Fankhauser et al.
2018), and several small European states have implemented durable climate
policy (Andersen 2019). While backlash is increasingly mentioned by climate
policy scholars in recent years, this is usually in passing or situated within wider
explanations of policy variation rather than taking the form of speciﬁc explana-
tions of backlash itself as a dependent variable.

Some scholars examine climate policy variation between countries and its
development over time. An important focus is political systems and electoral
institutions. These scholars argue that non-majoritarian systems shield politi-
cians from discontent over speciﬁc policies more readily than majoritarian
systems, allowing costs to be imposed on consumers (Lipscy 2018), and that
corporatist intermediation between organized interests can generate durable
commitment compared to adversarial majoritarian pluralist systems (Andersen
2019). Majoritarian adversarial systems can impose costs on both consumers
and producers but are more susceptible to reversal (Finnegan 2022).
Mildenberger (2020) also considers institutionalized representation, arguing
that fossil fuel interests are represented by both business and labor in political
decision-making, which can block climate policy from multiple angles.

Others examine the consequences of populism for climate policy, observ-
ing that right-wing populisms often (but not always) deny or downplay climate
change (Hess and Renner 2019). Lockwood (2018) scrutinizes the reasons for
right-wing opposition to climate action, arguing that ideological factors (e.g.,
illiberalism, antipathy toward elites) are more convincing than structural factors
(e.g., job losses, economic marginalization), partly due to cross-class support
for populists. In contrast to studies of climate policy variation and develop-
ment, populism scholars examine challenges to elite forms of authority
(e.g., representational, expert) by those advocating instead for popular author-
ity. Moreover, studies of populism reveal the role of symbols and emotions
motivating “raw” forms of political behavior (e.g., incivility, aggression), high-
lighting how counteraction can arise in ways that challenge institutionalized
politics.

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72 (cid:129) Backlash to Climate Policy

Recently, Aklin and Mildenberger (2020) argued for a distributional pol-
itics approach, where conﬂict over costs and beneﬁts is central to counteraction.
Experiences of climate policy backlash also highlight the need to jointly con-
sider routine/institutionalized politics (e.g., representation, elections, interest
groups) and nonroutine/noninstitutionalized politics (e.g., social movements,
mobilization) in counteraction.4 This brings attention to both within-policy
dynamics and wider relations between policy and its context. It also raises ques-
tions about grievance formation. Alongside costs and beneﬁts, moral judgments
about policy action among endogenous actors also drive political behavior.

Approaches to Policy Backlash

Backlash is of increasing interest in political research. It has been employed
regarding issues of energy infrastructure (Stokes 2016), international courts
(Madsen et al. 2018), social norms (Mansbridge and Shames 2008), tax policy
( Wilensky 2002), and cultural shifts (Norris and Inglehart 2019). Scholars of
backlash politics argue that it reﬂects a distinct phenomenon that differs from
ordinary forms of political opposition or disagreement (Alter and Zürn 2020;
Madsen et al. 2018; Patashnik 2019). Ultimately, this distinction may be partly
one of degree (backlash as a form of strong counteraction) and partly one of kind
(involving distinct political dynamics). Yet, regarding the former, backlash needs
clariﬁcation, and regarding the latter, it demands explanation beyond labeling.
Current conceptualizations of backlash risk conﬂating different political
dynamics in the name of parsimony by aggregating different phenomena (e.g.,
decisions, policies, regimes, cultural shifts). While there may be common features
in the dynamics of backlash across triggers, it is prudent to be more speciﬁc. In
other words, backlash to what? Climate policy backlash concerns reactions to
public policy. It involves an attempt to reverse a policy following its introduction,
through an abrupt negative response that is relatively unexpected and that is
forceful or threatening to policy proponents due to volatile and/or transgressive
political behavior. This allows empirical identiﬁcation of policy backlash across
cases and settings. It also suggests that both within-policy and extrapolicy factors
are involved. Hence, two important lines of thinking to consider are policy feed-
back, which examines the consequences of policy on subsequent politics, and
contentious politics, which examines how public contention arises.

Policy Feedback

Policy feedback is a prominent body of work at the intersection of historical
institutionalism and policy studies examining how policy reshapes subsequent
politics (Béland and Schlager 2019; Pierson 1993). Policy feedback scholars

4. This divide has been identiﬁed by both political scientists (Hacker and Pierson 2014, 650) and

sociologists (McAdam and Tarrow 2010).

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(cid:129) 73

have long highlighted resource effects (e.g., beneﬁts, incentives) and interpretive
effects (e.g., information, meaning) on a range of actors, including political
elites, organized groups, and mass publics (Béland and Schlager 2019;
Pierson 1993). Climate politics draws on ideas about positive (policy-reinforcing)
and negative (policy-undermining) feedback, which typically consider gradual
feedbacks over years to decades. Jacobs and Weaver (2015) identify gradual
endogenous sources of undermining feedback (i.e., unanticipated losses, strate-
gic cultivation of grievance, presence of policy alternatives) that suggest ways
that escalation might occur during backlash. Skogstad (2017), on the other
hand, highlights exogenous sources of undermining feedback, such as shifts
in wider political ideas and institutional contexts.

Policy feedback scholars have occasionally mentioned backlash (e.g.,
Hacker and Pierson 2014; Jordan and Matt 2014; Pierson 1993), but this notion
remained undeveloped until Patashnik (2019, 48) proposed a view of policy
backlash as rapidly escalating, or “an extreme case of,” negative feedback. His
approach centers on countermobilization as a core feature and proposes various
mechanisms of how this occurs and involving whom. This could include mass
publics (i.e., people angered by perceived losses, by political elites who are per-
ceived to overreach in their policy priorities, or by resentment from some social
groups toward others), organized interests (i.e., discontent from withdrawn
beneﬁts), political elites (i.e., party differentiation), or broader erosion of sup-
port bases (i.e., self-undermining feedbacks) (Patashnik 2019). This approach
illuminates a range of ways in which backlash might occur but leaves somewhat
open the question of what is truly in common between them. It also identiﬁes
but does not elaborate on mobilization dynamics outside of routine politics.

Contentious Politics

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Contentious politics is a prominent body of work in social movement studies
examining collective challenges to formal political authority that emerge epi-
sodically outside of routine politics (McAdam et al. 2001). For example, this
can include movements, strikes, and riots, the onset of which is contingent
on both proximate and contextual factors (Barrie 2021; McAdam et al. 2001).
Scholars have identiﬁed the possibility of backlash as counteraction to move-
ments, such as repression (Amenta et al. 2010, 290), or as “reactive sequences”
of reactions and countereactions to an initial challenge (Tarrow 2022, 21). But,
somewhat puzzlingly, there has been less emphasis on direct threat as a trigger
of contention—a “suddenly imposed grievance” (McAdam et al. 2001, 310) as
for policy backlash—rather than opportunity (e.g., expanding rights and recog-
nition) (McAdam and Boudet 2012, 96). Social movement scholars are begin-
ning to examine climate politics (e.g., McAdam and Boudet 2012), and vice
versa (Neville 2021), but this is a relatively recent development.

Situated broadly within contentious politics, Alter and Zürn (2020)
develop a speciﬁc approach to conceptualizing backlash politics as an

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74 (cid:129) Backlash to Climate Policy

extraordinary form of contention. They argue that backlash involves three nec-
essary conditions: an attempt to return to a prior situation, extraordinary forms
of action, and salience within public discourse. They also argue that direct trig-
gers only partially explain the occurrence of backlash, suggesting that grievance
formation within a wider context is important.

Combined Insights

Understanding climate policy backlash requires combining insights from exist-
ing approaches within the domain of climate politics. My focus is on hard cli-
mate policy at the level of a political community (rather than place-based siting
controversies). In this light, backlash is an abrupt counteraction (drawing on
climate politics) involving strong negative feedback (drawing on policy feed-
back) that erupts in unconﬁned ways in response to grievance (drawing on con-
tentious politics).

However, linkages between routine and nonroutine politics are underde-
veloped (Barrie 2021; Hacker and Pierson 2014; McAdam and Tarrow 2010).
Backlash can originate among either mass publics or elites and organized groups
and spill over between them. For example, elites may attempt to mobilize con-
tention into the public sphere (Mildenberger 2020), such as through political
entrepreneurs raising the salience of losses to certain groups (Patashnik
2019). On the other hand, social movements can inﬂuence political elites
through claim making during elections (Tarrow 2022), which may consolidate
as persistent cleavages (Alter and Zürn 2020). Furthermore, media coverage is
thought to be an important factor linking oppositional elites and mass publics
(Béland and Schlager 2019, 201; Hacker and Pierson 2019, 17). Importantly,
McAdam et al.’s (2001, 15) general caution against downplaying “the contin-
gency, emotionality, plasticity, and interactive character of movement politics”
is relevant. Backlash requires going beyond the policy-centered frame of much
policy feedback research and the movement-centered frame of much conten-
tious politics research to examine how these forces operate interactively within
a context.

While mass publics are key actors in backlash, they are not uniform, nor
are speciﬁc social groups necessarily identiﬁable prior to backlash. Mass publics
develop subjective perceptions about policy. Policy feedback scholars have long
been aware of the social construction of target groups through the gradual for-
mation of social categories linked to policy beneﬁts/ harms (Béland and
Schlager 2019). On the other hand, contentious politics scholars emphasize
the “creation of new actors and identities through the very process of conten-
tion” (McAdam et al. 2001, 33). Indeed, a key element of the distinction
between “routine” and “nonroutine” politics for them is whether actor identities
are pre-established or “newly self-identiﬁed,” respectively (McAdam et al. 2001,
8). This is relevant to backlash because new social groups may rapidly form
around a perceived threat/grievance unforeseen by policy proponents (such

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(cid:129) 75

as the Yellow Vests movement in France forging an identity as a nonurban
precariat).

But where does grievance—whether among mass publics or elites and
organized groups—come from? As shown in the previous section, climate pol-
itics has rich insights on the material and institutional drivers of counteraction
to climate policy, emphasizing strategic response to incentives/opportunities.
But importantly, people react not only to objective costs but also to the percep-
tion of costs (Patashnik 2019). For example, Mildenberger et al. (2022) ﬁnd that
perceptions of carbon pricing compensation can be skewed by political parti-
sanship, leading to overestimation of cost burdens. This suggests that backlash
is a function not only of material effects but also of perceptions.

Scholars of policy feedback have also long highlighted interpretive effects
of policy. This involves the information and meaning that policy conveys for
different actors (Pierson 1993). For example, it can include the visibility of costs
and beliefs about who is responsible (Pierson 1993) and how a policy is framed
in relation to other issues of concern (Millar et al. 2021). Populism scholars
highlight interpretive aspects differently when they observe symbolic meanings
of climate policy in ideological terms (Lockwood 2018). Thus, material costs
and beneﬁts could sometimes take on magniﬁed salience because of what they
represent within wider political struggles. For example, Skocpol (2013) argues
that creeping rightward shifts among republicans over decades drove backlash
against domestic climate policy negotiations in the United States in 2009–2010.
Both material and interpretive sources of grievance are likely to be
involved in climate policy backlash. But for backlash to take hold, grievance
must also escalate or spread to create an abrupt and relatively unforeseen threat
to policy proponents. Existing approaches to backlash insufﬁciently explain this
key aspect, attributing it to rising waves of discontent (Patashnik 2019) or
“companion accelerants,” such as “nostalgia, emotional appeals, [and] taboo
breaking” (Alter and Zürn 2020, 563). But why such dynamics take hold
remains opaque. Arguably, there must be a widely perceived grievance powerful
enough to rapidly expand contention and spill over between actors.

The core grievance underpinning climate policy backlash is, I argue, con-
tested legitimacy of a policy action. Indeed, scholars of backlash politics already
point to contested legitimacy in their accounts but have done so largely in pass-
ing rather than making it central. For example, Alter and Zürn (2020, 567) link
the extraordinary character of backlash to rejection of “broadly shared under-
standings of what is considered politically legitimate” in terms of acceptable
responses, and Patashnik (2019, 51) identiﬁes threat to “beliefs about the legit-
imate role and purposes of government” as one form of loss that can motivate
responses by certain actors. Alter and Zürn (2020, 564) also observe that some
contests can “escalate into existential disagreements” but leave somewhat open
the reasons why this might occur. More broadly, Skogstad (2017, 24) observes
that policies can have interpretive effects that inﬂuence actors’ views about what
constitute “legitimate/illegitimate policies.” Policy feedback scholars also argue

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76 (cid:129) Backlash to Climate Policy

that threats to identity can motivate reactions by certain actors (Hacker and
Pierson 2019; Patashnik 2019; Skogstad 2017), although they often view this
through the prism of endogenously formed identities linked to prior policy ben-
eﬁts. Alternatively, climate policy scholars have gestured toward a sense of basic
fairness as central to adverse reactions to policy proposals (Bergquist et al.
2022), although this may signal legitimacy since it suggests a moral judgment
about policy acceptability. Contested legitimacy, therefore, provides the fuel for
backlash—its volatility, escalation, and unconﬁned scope spanning routine and
nonroutine politics.

Conceptual Pathway

Figure 1 shows a conceptual pathway for the occurrence of backlash in climate
policy. First, a policy is proposed or enacted, which leads to perceptions about
its effects among different actors (e.g., political elites; organized groups; mass
publics, including existing and as-yet unformed social groups). Actors also eval-
uate policy against shared beliefs about the rightful exercise of public authority.
If the policy conﬂicts with these beliefs, it creates deep-seated grievance, which
can (but might not) give rise to backlash. Other contextual contingencies may
also be important for allowing grievance to coalesce and escalate (e.g., slow-
building pressure, opportunity structures). But contested legitimacy is the
crucial factor making backlash possible and translating perceived policy effects
into volatile counteraction.

The effects of backlash can vary. Not only is policy substance at stake, but
so is representative authority of policy proponents. Political competition may
also be reshaped. Regarding policy substance, backlash need not involve reversal
of the policy (Alter and Zürn 2020; Madsen et al. 2018). Immediate effects
could include no change, modiﬁcation, delay, or repeal/abandonment. But
longer-term effects could include enduring damage to the legitimacy of a policy
(McConnell 2011) or an entire policy agenda (Rosenbloom et al. 2019).
The abrupt and forceful character of backlash threatens the representative
authority of policy proponents (Alter and Zürn 2020; Hacker and Pierson
2019; Patashnik 2019). This could include reduced trust and mandate, as well
as damage to “electoral prospects,” the “capacity to govern,” and “the direction

Figure 1
Proposed pathway for the Occurrence of Backlash to Climate Policy

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(cid:129) 77

of government” (McConnell 2011, 356). Regarding political competition, back-
lash can create cleavages (Alter and Zürn 2020) that lead to political realign-
ments by “forc[ing] elites to reconsider their commitments and allegiances”
(McAdam et al. 2001, 9). It can inﬂuence public opinion and voting behavior
(Stokes 2016). It might also consolidate opposition among elites and organized
groups (Lacombe 2022) by generating “ﬁerce enemies … and political clout for
future battles” (Skocpol 2013).

The pathway in Figure 1 foregrounds contested legitimacy as a decisive ele-
ment that, although certainly not absent, has remained underdeveloped in
thinking about backlash politics so far. This offers a fuller view of why backlash
arises in response to policy action. It also suggests why speed5 and scale6 of
policy action may not be determinative of backlash—what matters is whether
the legitimacy of a policy action is accepted or challenged.

Backlash and Contested Legitimacy

Contested legitimacy concerns acquiescence or non-acquiescence to the wield-
ing of public authority over policy recipients. Hard climate policy imposes bur-
dens or compulsory expectations, which can lead to perceptions of adverse
effects. But such policy is also judged by actors in relation to shared beliefs in
the political community about the rightful exercise of public authority. Authority
refers to “the capacity to issue commands and take steps with a reasonable
expectation that others will accept these actions as legitimate” (Pierson 1993,
598) and therefore involves “a claim on the part of those making it for deference
or compliance” (Skogstad and Whyte 2015, 83). Hacker and Pierson (2014)
remind us that “at its heart, politics is about the exercise of public authority”
involving “the coercive power of the state to impose their preferences on losers
through public policies” (648), and hence policy making can involve “signiﬁ-
cant exercises of public authority” (656). How exercises of public authority
involved in hard climate policy are judged by policy recipients is pivotal to
whether public authority is viewed as legitimate. Yet, since legitimacy arises in
reference to “the scope of authority claimed” (Bernstein 2011, 21), incumbents
do not have carte blanche for any desired policy; the wielding of public author-
ity in a new way may be contested.

Legitimacy in a political sense involves “the acceptance and justiﬁcation of
shared rule by a community” (Bernstein 2005, 142), particularly concerning
“governance and authority relationships” (Bernstein 2011, 19). Authoritative
actions, such as those taken by a state, must be “acknowledged as rightful by
those involved in a given power relation” to be legitimate (Beetham 2013, x),
including among those within a political community who may disagree with

5. Alter and Zürn (2020, 573) reﬂect on the puzzling timing of backlash to sociopolitical

developments.

6. Patashnik (2019) suggests policy overreach as one possible reason for backlash, but either

“small” or “large” developments might trigger backlash.

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78 (cid:129) Backlash to Climate Policy

policy substance but still accept the right of those in power to take such action
(Black 2008; Bodansky 1999; Skogstad 2003). Contested legitimacy is, there-
fore, a serious and potentially destabilizing issue that goes beyond ordinary
opposition, threatening policy enactment and entrenchment. Yet, the study of
legitimacy remains underdeveloped in domestic climate politics (Purdon 2015).
Legitimacy can be considered in normative or sociological terms. Norma-
tive approaches are most common, analyzing empirical circumstances against
external criteria specifying what “ought” to be required for legitimacy to be
present (Black 2008; Tallberg et al. 2018). On the other hand, sociological legit-
imacy analyzes whether an action is deemed to be legitimate by endogenous
actors themselves (Bernstein 2005; Black 2008; Tallberg et al. 2018). Hence,
“the relationship between justiﬁcations and acceptability [becomes] … a matter
of investigation” (Bernstein 2011, 20). Sociological legitimacy is suited to
studying climate policy backlash because it considers how actors themselves
interpret policy action and decide whether to acquiesce. In other words, analysis
is “internal to the social belief system in question, rather than based on an exter-
nal criterion of validity” (Beetham 2013, xi).7

Importantly, the focus is not the state of legitimacy at a particular moment
but, rather, the processes by which legitimacy is built (legitimation) or under-
mined (delegitimation). Legitimacy contestation involves the struggle over com-
peting processes of legitimation and delegitimation (following Bäckstrand and
Söderbaum 2018; Bernstein 2011). Hard policy must be legitimated when mak-
ing new demands on actors but might also be vulnerable to delegitimation. For
example, social movement scholars have observed that challengers and incum-
bents can legitimate/delegitimate actions and claims of a movement (McAdam
et al. 2001, 311). In climate policy backlash, proponents exercise authority
through a policy action, which other actors may attempt to delegitimate.

Evaluative Judgments

Evaluative judgments made by endogenous actors are the mechanism by which
contested legitimacy arises. This concerns both perceived policy effects and the
exercise of public authority through policy action (Figure 1). Perceived policy
effects matter because evaluative judgments are not free of self-interest; interests
inform moral reasoning about appropriate ways of achieving a certain payoff
(Dellmuth and Schlipphak 2020, 933). Shared beliefs about the rightful use
of public authority matter because actors evaluate political developments with
reference to what they understand to be appropriate in the political community
(Beetham 2013).

Perceived policy effects involve both interests and moral reasoning. Cli-
mate politics scholars highlight that resource effects of policy can inﬂuence

7. Thereby, sociological legitimacy avoids a normative stance, such as viewing backlash only as a

conservative reactionary response.

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(cid:129) 79

counteraction. When such effects are perceived as morally unacceptable (e.g.,
magnitude, distribution), this could prompt criticism over legitimacy. While it
may seem counterintuitive to combine interests and moral reasoning, scholars
have suggested that sociological legitimacy arises from both a sense of rightful-
ness and interests (Black 2008; Dellmuth and Schlipphak 2020) or social desir-
ability (Skogstad 2003). Beetham (2013, xiii) highlights that “ends or purposes”
matter for endogenous actors alongside their normative reasoning. In climate
politics, Skocpol (2013, 11) argues that policy reforms must “not appear inim-
ical to the everyday values and economic concerns” of people, suggesting that
policy effects inform evaluative judgments. But interests alone do not determine
whether legitimacy is contested. “Loser’s consent”—the willingness of those on
the losing side to accept political decisions as legitimate—is central to demo-
cratic stability (Rich and Treece 2018), and its absence could contribute to
contested legitimacy. Agné (2018, 34) suggests that when institutions entail
moral goals, “subjects may act morally and self-interestedly at the same
time”—yet this is the rule rather than the exception for distributional problems
such as climate change.

Shared beliefs about the rightful use of public authority within a political
community constitute a broader yardstick for evaluative judgments. This may
include shared beliefs about freedom (e.g., behavioral choices), liberty (e.g., free
exchange, investment), egalitarianism (e.g., distribution of costs), or representa-
tion (e.g., procedural fairness). After all, legitimacy itself involves a sense of
rightful action within a “socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs,
and deﬁnitions” (Suchman 1995, 574). Hence, “a given power relationship
[or exercise of public authority] is not legitimate because people believe in its
legitimacy, but because it can be justiﬁed in terms of their beliefs” (Beetham
2013, 11). Justiﬁability is therefore a key aspect of legitimacy, but so is legal
validity concerning alignment with prevailing laws (Beetham 2013). For exam-
ple, climate policy has been challenged in Australia in terms of its justiﬁability
regarding norms of economic liberty and good governance (Crowley 2017) and
in Canada regarding constitutional validity (Chalifour 2019).

Importantly, evaluative judgments will be heterogeneous due to diverse
preferences, values, and worldviews (Black 2008, 145). Climate policy scholars
have recognized social heterogeneity among policy recipients (Rhodes et al.
2017). Political scientists have observed that polarization entrenches cleavages
(Hacker and Pierson 2019), which could also condition evaluative judgments.
Hence, legitimacy is not conferred or contested homogenously. What matters
for climate policy backlash is the degree to which a sense of contested legitimacy
escalates to threaten policy proponents.

Delegitimation

But how does contested legitimacy come to threaten policy proponents? It does
so through attempts to delegitimate the policy in question. This is the “lash” of

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80 (cid:129) Backlash to Climate Policy

backlash, an action striking out in response to threat. Delegitimation refers to
processes by which the authoritative status of an action or institution is under-
mined (Bäckstrand and Söderbaum 2018). Aggrieved actors form negative eval-
uative judgments of a policy, generating strong emotions that motivate them to
attempt to delegitimate it. As a result, “extraordinary objectives often inspire
taboo breaking to underscore the extraordinary nature of the claims” (Alter
and Zürn 2020, 564). As backlash takes hold, processes of delegitimation over-
whelm competing processes of legitimation; delegitimation attempts are not a
threat if isolated, only if they escalate.

Delegitimation can occur through a variety of potentially linked practices.
Studying global governance, Bäckstrand and Söderbaum (2018) categorize dis-
cursive (e.g., public criticism), institutional (e.g., defection), and behavioral
(e.g., dissent) delegitimation practices. Similarly, but for domestic political
regimes, Beetham (2013) identiﬁes what could be broadly construed as delegit-
imation practices spanning legal congruence (e.g., rule conﬂict), justiﬁability
(e.g., clash with shared beliefs), and consent (e.g., withdrawn consent). For
policy, I combine these categories as argumentative (i.e., criticisms of policy
considering wider shared beliefs), structural (i.e., conﬂict of policy with extant
institutions), and behavioral (i.e., noncompliance or nonadoption) (Table 1).
Importantly, a focus on practices differs to input/throughput/output legiti-
macy,8 stages that are likely to be difﬁcult to separate empirically from the per-
spective of endogenous actors (also following Tallberg et al. 2018).

Argumentative delegitimation practices refers to claims about the unjustiﬁa-
bility of a policy considering shared beliefs of the political community. This
may concern beliefs about how the society incarnates basic values (such as
democracy, freedom, equality) and reconciles tensions between them, which
provides a constitutive ideational fabric against which new policy action may
be claimed to clash. For example, it might involve criticisms of fairness, as in
the case of the Yellow Vests protests in France (Kinniburgh 2019). Importantly,
argumentative practices are not about beliefs in legitimacy held by individual
policy recipients but rather argumentation in reference to shared beliefs of the
political community among various actors and observers (Beetham 2013). Such
practices could be evidenced by the content of political rhetoric, media opin-
ions, and protest messages (Bäckstrand and Söderbaum 2018) or other persua-
sive efforts (e.g., campaigns).

Structural delegitimation practices refers to attempts to substantiate a conﬂict
between policy action and extant institutions (e.g., constitutions, laws). Such
institutions may be portrayed as preeminent and worthy of prevailing in the
face of a new policy that (potentially) transgresses them. For example, this could
include legal or constitutional challenges, such as brought by some Canadian
provinces against the national government in 2019–2021. The key question is

8. This typology is often applied normatively (e.g., Schmidt 2013), but this is not essential
(Skogstad 2003). Yet, if applied sociologically, it raises the question of the basis for evaluative
judgments made by endogenous actors.

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(cid:129) 81

Table 1
Delegitimation Practices in Policy Backlash

Category

Routine Politics

Nonroutine Politics

Delegitimation Practices

Argumentative

(cid:129) Elite political rhetoric
(cid:129) Party manifestos/positions
(cid:129) Campaigns by interest groups
(cid:129) Media opinions

Structural

(cid:129) Court challenges by elites or

interest groups

Behavioral

(cid:129) Legal challenge in legislative committees
(cid:129) Defection of ofﬁcials
(cid:129) Withholding resources
(cid:129) Renouncing commitments
(cid:129) Voting of mass publics
(cid:129) Voting of political elites
(cid:129) Noncompliance by organized interests

(e.g., industry, labor)

(cid:129) Protest messages
(cid:129) Campaigns by
social groups
(cid:129) Social media

diffusion of ideas

(cid:129) Media opinions
(cid:129) Court challenges
by social groups

(cid:129) Protests
(cid:129) Strikes, blockades
(cid:129) Riots
(cid:129) Property

destruction
(cid:129) Disobedience/
noncompliance
(cid:129) Spectacles/symbols

of refusal

whether authority has been acquired or exercised in contravention of existing
accepted rules (Beetham 2013) and, if so, we could add, whether the original
rules should change. Such practices could be evidenced by court challenges to
institutional validity by routine or nonroutine actors or other forms of legal
challenge.

Behavioral delegitimation practices refer to actions of dissent or the
withdrawal of consent for a policy action (Bäckstrand and Söderbaum
2018; Beetham 2013). This could involve various actors, routine (e.g., political
elites, parties, interest groups) or nonroutine (e.g., mass publics, social
groups). Practices could include protests, strikes, and blockades (Bäckstrand
and Söderbaum 2018; Beetham 2013; McAdam et al. 2001), as well as disobe-
dience/noncompliance or spectacles of refusal. But behavioral delegitimation
practices can also occur within routine politics, such as defection of ofﬁcials,
withholding resources, renouncing commitments (Bäckstrand and Söderbaum
2018),9 voting behavior of mass publics and political representatives, and

9. Although the authors categorize these practices slightly differently.

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82 (cid:129) Backlash to Climate Policy

noncooperation by organized interests (e.g., industry). Such behavior also typ-
ically seeks to inﬂuence perceptions of observers. However, the contribution
of these practices to delegitimation needs to be empirically established and
not assumed.

Hypotheses

Finally, drawing on the three categories of delegitimation practices, I develop
initial hypotheses about climate policy backlash. These hypotheses map the
three categories of delegitimation practices against key aspects of climate policy
backlash—its manifestation (involving both eruption of grievance and escala-
tion) and resulting political effects (Table 2). This can guide explanatory empir-
ical analysis of backlash as an event/process rather than a snapshot.

Hypotheses H1A–D examine the eruption of grievance. H1A could elucidate
the role of rhetoric in backlash, for example, as a means of channeling discon-
tent. For example, Skocpol (2013) observed argumentative attacks on climate
policy from multiple actors, with nonroutine actors seemingly playing an
important role. H1B, if upheld, could suggest that opportunity for legal chal-
lenge (e.g., as seen in Canada) is a condition that might be exploited by those
seeking to cultivate backlash. H1C could establish whether backlash mimics pre-
vious repertoires of contention or develops new ones.10 For example, is the
salience of public protest in policy backlash proportional to the relative protest
tendency of a society? Delegitimation practices may also interact concerning
eruption of grievance. H1D, focusing on the sequencing of delegitimation prac-
tices, could establish whether backlash events take on different trajectories
depending on their starting points. For example, argumentative practices of
elites may require mobilizing grievance into the public sphere (following
Mildenberger 2020), but on the other hand, behavioral practices may be difﬁ-
cult to initiate, especially in nonroutine politics.

Hypotheses H2A–D examine the escalation of grievance. H2A examines the
conditions for argumentative practices to take hold. For example, Lindvall
(2017) suggests that in majoritarian systems, some actors may turn to nonrou-
tine politics due to a lack of representation compared to proportional represen-
tation systems. Do political institutions inﬂuence argumentation of backlash?
H2B could establish the conditions under which structural practices, which
could be seen as matters only of legal compliance, take on wider salience. In
other words, when does a structural practice (e.g., strategic court challenge)
stimulate grievance among other actors? H2C could establish whether the
number of behavioral practices grows during backlash and how they interact.
For example, backlash to climate policy in Australia in 2012–2014 involved
practices of elites interacting with those of mass publics (Crowley 2017).

10. Familiar forms of activity may lower coordination costs among participants and efﬁciently carry

meaning to observers, increasing their chances of use.

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Table 2
Initial Hypotheses About Climate Policy Backlash

James J. Patterson

(cid:129) 83

Aspect of
Backlash

Eruption

Escalation

Effects

Hypotheses

H1A Argumentative practices of delegitimation in nonroutine politics are
most threatening to policy proponents because they introduce the
greatest uncertainty about the extent of support for claims.
H1B Structural practices of delegitimation are equally likely to occur in
pluralist and neocorporatist political systems because legal challenges in
principle require only a small number of aggrieved actors.
H1C Behavioral practices of delegitimation occur within routine and
nonroutine politics in ways that replicate previous forms of contention.
H1D Behavioral practices (e.g., public protests, elite defection) are more
likely to lead to backlash than are argumentative practices alone because
the latter require behavioral practices to consolidate argumentative
claims.
H2A Argumentative practices of delegitimation are more likely to
escalate/spread in antagonistic majoritarian political systems than in
corporatist proportional representation systems.
H2B Structural practices of delegitimation gain greater support in
polarized than in nonpolarized settings because an institutional
challenge takes on symbolic rather than solely technical meaning to
observers.
H2C Behavioral practices taken early will inspire others such that the
number of behavioral practices grows during backlash.
H2D The diversity of delegitimation practices grows during a successful
backlash by inspiring actors with agency in different venues.
H3A Argumentative practices of delegitimation undermine the broader
authority of policy proponents, who become seen as antithetical to the
well-being of a political community.
H3B Structural practices of delegitimation differently affect policy
proponents and challengers, with proponents harmed more by losses.
H3C The larger the variety and/or scale of behavioral delegitimation
practices is, the more likely it is that a policy will be reversed.
H3D Argumentative and behavioral delegitimation practices have more
enduring effects on political competition following backlash than do
structural practices because the former carry moral weight, whereas the
latter can be rationalized instrumentally.

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84 (cid:129) Backlash to Climate Policy

Alternatively, the extent to which practices of mass publics are repressed may
also be important for backlash trajectories. Delegitimation practices may also
interact concerning escalation of grievance. H2D could establish whether delegit-
imation practices have catalytic inﬂuence or whether different practices arise
independently. If the former, then strategic cultivation of backlash in routine
politics may be possible, whereas if the latter is found, then backlash may be
inherently spontaneous.

Hypotheses H3A–D examine the effects of backlash. H3A could help to
understand how policy proponents are impacted by backlash, for example,
how they lose representative authority. H3B could uncover whether structural
practices have enduring and possibly asymmetric effects on political competi-
tion. For example, to what extent is trust in an incumbent harmed, and does
a challenger gain support whether or not they prevail? H3C could establish
the conditions under which policy action, or a broader policy agenda, is
reversed because of backlash. For example, was the success of backlash to cli-
mate policy in Australia in 2012–2014 and in Ontario in 2018–2019 due to
the forms and scale of behavioral practices? Was a climate policy agenda
derailed or just reshaped by the Yellow Vests protests in France in 2018–2019
due to the historically large scale of social mobilization? Delegitimation prac-
tices may also interact concerning political effects. H3D could establish whether
different delegitimation practices have different long-term effects. For example,
would a constitutional challenge to climate policy (e.g., Canada) have similar
effects on political competition as mass mobilization (e.g., France) or an acri-
monious rhetorical portrayal of climate policy as antithetical to shared beliefs
(e.g., Australia)?

Many other hypotheses could be developed involving factors such as ini-
tiating actors (e.g., elites, nonelites), opportunity structures (e.g., election cycles,
party representation, veto points), the role of media, histories of contention
over climate change, and cognate grievances (e.g., diffuse social tension). But
while prior subthreshold tension may increase the potential for backlash, social
movement scholars have argued that pressure alone is not enough to explain
episodes of contention. Instead, we must identify the ways in which pressure
is transformed into contentious struggle (McAdam et al. 2001, 306–307). More-
over, the criteria by which endogenous actors make evaluative judgments—“the
broader normative and institutional environment that gives them meaning”
(Bernstein 2018, 196)—can also evolve over time, shifting the reference points
for delegitimation. As Bernstein suggests, delegitimation practices might affect
the constitutive ideational setting itself.

Conclusions

This article began with the need to consider counteraction as a dependent var-
iable in the politics of climate policy making, speciﬁcally, the issue of policy
backlash, which is increasingly mentioned but understudied. I argue that policy

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James J. Patterson

(cid:129) 85

backlash is grounded in contested legitimacy and manifests through practices of
delegitimation to provide a so-far lacking conceptual foundation for studying
and comparing different cases, which also has potential relevance to other
domains. This contributes to delineating and explaining backlash as a particular
form of strong counteraction in climate politics, which is already noteworthy
but may become a greater risk in coming years as hard policy becomes an
increasingly necessary component of ambitious climate action. The hypotheses
generated in this article can guide explanatory empirical analysis of climate pol-
icy backlash, which is currently lacking, crucially, treating backlash as an event
or process rather than as a snapshot.

Viewing policy action as a trigger for counteraction reﬂects a policy-
focused approach to politics (sensu Hacker and Pierson 2014). It also reso-
nates with a relative gap in the contentious politics literature regarding
response to sudden threat (McAdam and Boudet 2012). The issue of backlash,
therefore, cuts across both routine and nonroutine politics, drawing together
ﬁelds that are usually studied separately. The article also reﬂects a needed
“problem-driven” approach to studying legitimacy (following Tallberg et al.
2018, 6), helping to elucidate the understudied issue of delegitimation in
struggles over climate policy. More generally, the article encourages policy
feedback scholars to give greater attention to volatile pushbacks, which have
not typically been prominent in this literature, and encourages contentious
politics scholars to consider counteraction to policy as a source of grievance
for nonroutine action.

The central role of contested legitimacy suggests a partly ideational expla-
nation for backlash rather than one centered on interests and institutions alone.
While climate politics scholars have certainly given attention to interpretive
effects of policy, this can sometimes remain “thin” concerning grievance forma-
tion. Contested legitimacy is different, as it profoundly shapes the moral
meaning of policy action among policy recipients and observers. Interests and
institutions remain central. But how policy recipients judge the rightfulness of
policy is also crucial. Such meaning is formed within wider social and cultural
contexts, suggesting a need for greater attention to the ways in which percep-
tions and meanings of climate policy are constructed among different groups
within heterogenous societies.

Altogether, this suggests the need for a contextual approach to understand-
ing the politics of climate policy enactment. Backlash may not be easily predict-
able in advance, even though opposition from certain actors might be. Backlash
requires not only that some actors attempt to delegitimate policy action but also
that this escalates to create a broad-based threat to policy proponents. This
involves complex relations with the constitutive ideational context, which
remain understudied in domestic climate politics. Thereby, backlash fore-
grounds “connections between the social relations of human society and the
institutional—and extra-institutional—dimensions of politics” (Barrie 2021,
921), in other words, political sociology alongside political economy.

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86 (cid:129) Backlash to Climate Policy

James J. Patterson is an assistant professor in the Environmental Governance
group of the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht Univer-
sity, the Netherlands. His research explores the political and institutional
dynamics of climate action within the broader perspective of sustainability
transformations. His work includes publications in journals such as Nature Sus-
tainability, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, and Environmental
Innovation and Societal Transitions and a volume in the Elements in Earth System
Governance series published by Cambridge University Press: Remaking Political
Institutions: Climate Change and Beyond. He is also currently domain editor of the
policy and governance section of Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change.

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