As climate targets tighten, all countries must transition toward a renewable electricity system, but conflicts about generation and infrastructure deployment impede transition progress. Although the triggers of opposition are well studied, what people want remains understudied. We survey citizen preferences for a renewable electricity future through a conjoint analysis among 4,103 individuals in Denmark, Portugal, Poland, and Germany. With our study we go beyond the Likert scale survey approach specifically seeking trade-offs and contextualized preferences for regional electricity system designs. We show the importance of identifying both the “least preferred” and “most preferred” solutions and highlighting the possibility of identifying very different systems with identical utility. Lastly, our research actively bridges the divide between social aspects and techno-economic modeling, promoting their integration. We show that the most preferred system design in all four countries is a predominantly regional one, based on rooftop solar, communally owned, and not relying on transmission expansion.

Political conflicts about energy and climate change policies often have local implications, yet little is known about local public opinion towards these policies. Here, we estimate support towards 26 climate change mitigation policies for 402 German counties and for up to four points of time using multilevel regression and poststratification. We find that local support for climate policies varies by up to 60 percentage points across German counties with large disparities between the rural and urban population. While support for the expansion of wind power plants and solar power plants have converged over the last years, attitudes on the phase-out of coal power have polarized across regions. Using a spatial panel analysis, we find that support for the expansion of wind and solar plants correlate with the actual development of solar and wind capacities in these regions. Moreover, the spread of climate policy opinion is strongly determined by spatial diffusion as change in one region positively influences the trajectory of policy opinion among its neighbors.

Abstract Political conflicts about energy and climate change policies have often local implications, yet little is known about local public opinion towards these policies. Here, we estimate support towards 26 climate change mitigation policies for 402 German counties and for up to four periods of time. We find that local support for climate policies varies by up to 60 percentage points across German counties. While support for the expansion of wind power plants and solar power plants have converged over the last years, attitudes on the phase out of coal power have polarized across regions. Using a spatial panel analysis, we detect that support for the expansion of wind and solar plants correlate with the actual development of solar and wind capacities in these regions. Moreover, the spread of climate policy opinion is strongly determined by spatial diffusion as change in one region positively influences the trajectory of policy opinion among its neighbors.

We investigate whether political ideology has an observable effect on decarbonization ambition, renewable power aims, and preferences for power system balancing technologies in four European countries. Based on the Energy Logics framework, we identify ideologically different transition strategies (state-centered, market-centered, grassroots-centered) contained in government policies and opposition party programs valid in 2019. We compare these policies and programs with citizen poll data. We find that ideology has a small effect: governments and political parties across the spectrum have similar, and relatively ambitious, decarbonization and renewables targets. This mirrors citizens' strong support for ambitious action regardless of their ideological self-description. However, whereas political positions on phasing out fossil fuel power are clear across the policy space, positions on phasing in new flexibility options to balance intermittent renewables are vague or non-existent. As parties and citizens agree on strong climate and renewable power aims, the policy ambition is likely to remain high, even if governments change.

A major controversy in the social cognitive neurosciences evolved around the question whether activity in the posterior superior temporal sulcus and adjacent temporoparietal junction (pSTS/TPJ-region) evoked by various tasks represents a common process or distinct processes. To investigate this question, we employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants performed Biological Motion (BM), Theory-of-Mind (ToM) and Moral Judgment (MJ) tasks. Importantly, for each task we used the same newly developed animated stimuli. Indicative of a common process, we identified small clusters of overlapping activity for BM and ToM in right pSTS and for ToM and MJ in bilateral pSTS and left TPJ. Indicative of distinct processes, on the contrary, we detected extensive dissociable activity for BM in right pSTS, for ToM in bilateral pSTS and left TPJ, and for MJ in bilateral pSTS and TPJ. Thus, our data provide strong evidence for a combined two-staged process account: (i) the parsing of a stream of visual-spatial information, represented by activity in right pSTS, where neighboring and overlapping clusters of increased responses were found for all three tasks; (ii) increasingly more complex processing of the communicative significance of other people's behavior, represented by hierarchically increasing activity in left pSTS and bilateral TPJ elicited by ToM and MJ.