Cool Dudes in Europe: Climate change denial amongst conservative ‘white’ men

Sammanfattning: Why are certain categories of people more likely than others to regard climate change as ‘fake news’? This thesis aims to replicate and expand on two earlier articles from McCright and Dunlap (2011) and Krange et al. (2019) who show that conservative white men are more likely to be climate change deniers in the US and Norway, respectively. This phenomenon is called the cool dude-effect. Theories about the cool dude-effect builds on research in risk perception and political psychology implying that individuals aren’t susceptible to facts that challenge their worldviews. This thesis also adds an intersectional perspective on the cool dude-effect. The objective of this study is to search for the cool dude-effect in a broader European context. To test this, a multilevel logistic regression is used on data from European Social Survey containing 39,000 respondents from 21 European countries. The results indicate, although not with a strong significance, that the cool dude-effect can be seen in a broader European context, indicating that this is a general trend across Western countries.