PCLM-D-22-00193

Secure and defensive forms of national identity and public support for climate policies

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Cislak,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Make an effort to address all the comments by the two reviewers. For some comments, if you disagree with the reviewer and do not want to make a suggested change, you may explain simply explain why not. However, there are some changes that are necessary conditions for the manuscript to be accepted for publication:​

Provide clear definitions of key concepts, particularly "national narcissism" and "national identity", including "secure national identity".

More clearly identify reasons for linkages between your independent and dependent variables (i.e., possible mechanisms).

Provide the items for the scales you use.

Address the first reviewer's uncertainty about your use of hierarchical linear models.

Address the first reviewer's comment about the absence of controls from previous analyses in the structural equation models, and provide information and your rationale for the methodological choices about “facet representative parceling” and “random allocation”.

Provide at least a little more more discussion, in response to the second reviewer's comment about whether a secure form of national identity can be operationalized with in-group identification.

Address the comment about representativeness, and make any necessary changes to the manuscript in this regard.

Address the second reviewer's query about the sufficiency of the one-item political orientation item.

Be careful to remove unjustifiably causal language.

Also, as the second reviewer says, the paper includes a number of typos and writing errors. In the abstract alone, the word "The" is missing at the very start, and in the article's first paragraph there is a period missing after "European citizens". Please be sure to correct such errors throughout the manuscript before resubmitting it.

Finally, the word "traditional" with respect to energy is odd. Isn't wind a traditional source of energy in many European countries? If by "traditional" you mean "fossil fuels", or even coal specifically, then say so. If you have a more specific criterion by which an energy source can be considered "traditional", please identify it.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 22 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at climate@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pclm/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Malcolm Fairbrother, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: I don't know

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I found the topic of this study intriguing, but it fell short in several critical respects which makes me hesitant to recommend it for publication in its current state. Especially issues such as unclear research questions with poor motivation, undefined concepts, lacking methodological presentation and execution.

• Difficult to understand abstract without brief explanations of key concepts (e.g., “national narcissism” or “secure national identity”)

• Isn’t the European Green Deal a package of policies, rather than a policy?

• Based on the intro, I get the sense that the authors want to portray the challenges posed by climate change as mainly technical and that solutions to the problem are mainly about technical effectiveness. Is there a way of broadening the view here, by discussing technological and socio-political challenges? I understand that this study focuses on precisely one of these types of challenges, but written this way it sounds like the authors are unaware of the literature on the embeddedness of climate change issues in social and political structures and contexts (the intro chapter in Brulle & Dunlap 2015 is a good starting point).

• In the introduction, the authors also discuss the importance of support for climate policies, but does not provide a clear enough idea about their research question(s). Is the focus on public support, or support by governments, or both? Given that the word “public” is in the title, it is clear that this is the focus, but the authors can improve the text by clearly stating in the intro and throughout the text.

• From what I gathered, many references come from the field of (social) psychology, but given the area of interest (support for climate policies) and the broader scope of the journal, I expected more references from sociology and political science etc. The authors could both (1) be more explicit about their psychological point of departure (if they agree), and (2) also cite a few more studies in adjacent fields that have tackled the issue of support for climate policy. Here, for example Drews & Van den Bergh (2016) could be useful.

• In the discussion of the literature on the links between national identity and environmentalism, the authors might find the work of Bernhard Forchtner relevant (e.g., Forchtner & Kølvraa 2015; Forchtner 2019) who discuss the national identity and environmentalism in the context of far right (rightwing populist) parties, especially the romanticization of local/national environment and nature while rejecting global environmental problems such as climate change.

• In the front end of the paper, I was missing clear definitions of key concepts when first introduced, such as national identity and national identification/narcissism. As written now, they are discussed without reference to the different (and sometimes contrarious) definitions, or to similar concepts (e.g., national identity vs. national pride), found in the literature. This is problematic, since as a reader it is difficult to understand what is meant by statements such as “90% of New Zealanders incorporate pro-environmental attitudes into their national identity”. I also struggled a bit to understand the distinction between “secure” and “defensive” forms of national identity. Several other concepts are used without explanation, such as “blind patriotism”.

• I was also missing some of the studies that do engage with the same topic of national identity and environmentalism or specifically about climate policy support. For instance, the works of Kari Marie Norgaard who discusses links between national identity and people’s climate change narratives, or the review by Masson & Fritsche (2021) on the social (e.g., national) effects on climate action, would be excellent additions in this regard.

• There is a lot of references and discussion (e.g., on page 5) on the relationship between various related variables (national identity, national narcissism, national identification and so on), but little explanations are offered in terms of the possible mechanisms etc.

• In the methods section, regarding study 1 (page 9), the authors mention the different scales that they use, but I cannot find a complete list of items for each measure and therefore cannot evaluate the quality and theoretical appropriateness of the scales. Moreover, the only test of reliability (or internal consistency) is Cronbach’s Alpha, which is generally not recommended as the only test of reliability, for instance due to it’s sensitivity to the number of items (which here range from 3-10).

• The correlation tables are cluttered with brackets etc. which makes them difficult to quickly review.

• The authors have used hierarchical linear modelling to control for additional variables (such as rightwing ideology) but fail to include other more relevant variables with greater potential to overlap with national identity, such as nativism, nationalism and populism. Considering that the authors compare the effects of identification with political ideology (page 14, row 297) it becomes something of a strawman, especially since we know that political ideology is generally a poor predictor of climate related beliefs in a Eastern European setting (see McCright et al. 2016, which is in the reference list but not cited in the text). I am also not clear over the use of hierarchical regression here, as there are no level-2 variables or no random effects estimated.

• Then the authors test the main relationships in a structural equation modelling framework, but here the authors do not include any of the controls from the previous analyses, so while issues of measurement error are addressed, there are a lot of additional controls (see examples above) that could have important implications for the strength of the main effects. The authors also do not provide any information and rationale for several of their methodological choices, such as “facet representative parceling” and “random allocation”.

• I was also thinking about the policies in focus, which refer bot to EU policies (Green Deal) and what I assume are policies at the national level (development of energy sources). What implications could this have for the results?

References

Drews, S., & Van den Bergh, J. C. (2016). What explains public support for climate policies? A review of empirical and experimental studies. Climate policy, 16(7), 855-876.

Dunlap, R. E., & Brulle, R. J. (Eds.). (2015). Climate change and society: Sociological perspectives. Oxford University Press.

Forchtner, B., & Kølvraa, C. (2015). The nature of nationalism: Populist radical right parties on countryside and climate. Nature and Culture, 10(2), 199-224.

Forchtner, B. (Ed.). (2019). The far right and the environment: Politics, discourse and communication. Routledge.

Reviewer #2: Review of “Secure and defensive forms of national identity and public support for climate policies”

The authors present correlational evidence in two separate studies among Poland participants for the hypothesis that national narcissism might have a role in understanding the attitudes toward climate change policies. The article is well-written and uses an underrepresented population. But I have some suggestions for improvement before publication.

Major Issue

1) More discussion is needed on how a secure form of national identity can be simply operationalized as the ingroup identification scale without asking anything regarding secure or defensive form.

Minor Issues

1) Both studies use non-probabilistic samples, and in such cases, I suggest urging caution when interpreting results in terms of “representativeness”. In other words, I recommend avoiding the use of statements like “thanks to the representativeness of the sample” because it is still a non-probabilistic sample, which is, therefore, probably a biased sample in terms of other characteristics that you did not measure when we consider the “representativeness” of the Polish population. So it would be better not to use this characteristic as a strength of the paper or it would be better not to start the Discussion with that emphasis on “representativeness.” This can mislead some readers in interpreting the results.

In addition, more information is needed regarding the larger survey used in Study 1 such as “how long was it? Were there similar measurements? In what order did your variables of interest come to participants and is there any way for testing potential order effects?

2) Is the support for national image investment incentivized? If yes, did you use deception? It would be better to give more detail regarding this. As far as I understand, it is not incentivized. However, even with a single lottery draw, the article's contribution will significantly improve if you replicate the findings by incentivizing this variable. You can refer to these references by considering this opportunity:

Regarding the intention-behavior gap:

• Sheeran, P., & Webb, T. L. (2016). The intention–behavior gap. Social and personality psychology compass, 10(9), 503-518.

Regarding the use of lottery draw as a low-cost and effective incentivization:

• Charness, G., Gneezy, U., & Halladay, B. (2016). Experimental methods: Pay one or pay all. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 131, 141-150.

3) Please avoid using causal language when interpreting the results, such as “the effect of national narcissism.” This is not an “effect”; this is just an association, and I believe the language of the manuscript should accurately reflect the conclusions.

4) More information is needed regarding the validity of Poland translations. Is there any evidence for construct validity, such as exploratory or confirmatory factor analysis? What about the newly developed scale’s validity? Is there any CFI result?

Relatedly, what about the validity of one item political orientation questionnaire in Poland? This might pose a problem because using a one-item general political orientation measure (instead of two social and economic conservatism questions) in the US context is problematic. The same thing might matter for the Poland case as well; that’s why more information is needed regarding the validity of this political orientation measure for the Polish context. The problem in the US is this: Libertarians in the US generally define themselves in the conservative part of this 1-7 general ideology spectrum, although they are socially liberal and only economically conservative. Nearly 20% of the conservatives in this single-item measure are thought to be actually libertarians. Similar groups can be in Poland as well; that’s why anything regarding this would be informative in the manuscript.

5) Generally, the manuscript is well-written, but polishing is needed, such as “wha”, “w using”.

I always sign my reviews,

Onurcan Yilmaz

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Onurcan Yilmaz

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Secure and defensive forms of national identity and public support for climate policies

PCLM-D-22-00193R1

Dear Dr. Cislak,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'Secure and defensive forms of national identity and public support for climate policies' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Climate.

Before your manuscript can be formally accepted you will need to complete some formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow-up email from a member of our team. Note that your manuscript will not be scheduled for publication until you have made the required changes, so a swift response is appreciated.

I would also ask you to make one final small change. One of the reviewers, as you noted, thought by "hierarchical regression model" you meant a hierarchical linear model, also known as a multilevel or mixed effects model. This seems to me an easy mistake for a reader to make (see https://www.statisticssolutions.com/hierarchical-linear-modeling-vs-hierarchical-regression/). While I think there are disciplinary differences at work here, it would be clearer for you not to refer to "a hierarchical regression model". Instead, could you perhaps say merely you perform "hierarchical regression"? I will not strictly require this, but simply ask that when you submit the final (formatted) version of your paper you make this change.

IMPORTANT: The editorial review process is now complete. PLOS will only permit corrections to spelling, formatting or significant scientific errors from this point onwards. Requests for major changes, or any which affect the scientific understanding of your work, will cause delays to the publication date of your manuscript.

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Thank you again for supporting Open Access publishing; we are looking forward to publishing your work in PLOS Climate.

Best regards,

Malcolm Fairbrother, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Reviewer Comments (if any, and for reference):