“There may have been a silent majority in favour of windfarms and higher petrol taxes, but if there was, these people were mighty quiet. Essentially, all I ever heard from was people objecting to them.” That was the view of a former UK MP who took part in new research that reveals how significantly British and Belgian politicians underestimate the public’s support for climate action.

From solar power and energy efficiency to meat taxes and frequent flyer levies, the politicians consistently failed to appreciate people’s appetite for policies that tackle global heating. The misapprehension has real world consequences: those politicians were less willing to vote for or speak up for those policies, according to the study.

The good news was that when a group of the politicians were told the true level of polling support for some policies, this improved their estimates of support for other green policies. However, it did not correct the underestimates completely, indicating that the information the politicians used to form their views of public opinion are misleading.

“Based on recent research, I think some of these issues with the information environment has to do with a rightwing bias where the voices of conservative leaning members of the public tend to be overrepresented, for a range of systemic reasons,” says Lisa-Maria Tanase, an academic at the University of Cambridge who led the research. “They tend to be more privileged, educated and politically engaged segments of society.” Anti-climate disinformation from lobby groups also contributes, she says.

A huge 89% majority of the world’s people want stronger action to fight the climate crisis, studies have shown, but are trapped in a self-fulfilling “spiral of silence” because they mistakenly believe they are in a minority. Making people aware that their pro-climate view is, in fact, by far the majority could unlock a social tipping point and help push leaders into the climate action so urgently needed, experts have said.

However, while the views of the public have been widely studied, relatively little was known about the extent to which lawmakers underestimate support for climate action. To address this, Tanase surveyed 100 current UK MPs, broadly reflecting the current political spread in parliament, and more than 600 Flemish politicians in Belgium.

The UK MPs were asked in early 2025 to estimate the level of public support for green policies and their answers were compared with an Ipsos poll of the public that asked the same questions. When asked about a tax on frequent fliers and taxes to reflect how environmentally friendly products are, the MPs thought only a minority supported them, when a majority actually did: the MPs underestimated support by about 15 percentage points.

They also underestimated public support for a tax on red meat and dairy products by 18 percentage points and for grants or loans to help people to make their homes more energy-efficient by seven.

Even when told that the members of the public surveyed had also received a clear description of the personal costs of the climate policies, MPs still significantly underestimated support. “They are perhaps overly pessimistic about the impact of costs” on public support, said Tanase. She was recently awarded a PhD for the research, which is in the process of being published in a prominent journal.

“We saw these misperceptions had direct consequences on climate policy progress,” Tanase added. “Our data showed that when the UK MPs believed there was insufficient support for some of the policies, they were less willing to speak up in support of the policy. In the Belgian case, they were less likely to vote for the policy in the local parliament.”

Tanase also interviewed former UK MPs: “They said one of the key barriers to them implementing stronger climate action is the fact that the public, in their opinion, was simply not ready. Due to these misperceptions, even willing politicians who want to do more felt their hands were tied.”

The much larger group of Belgian politicians meant that Tanase could test whether revealing the true level of public support helped change their misperceptions by a statistically significant amount. In this experiment, the politicians’ answers were compared with those from a poll by the University of Antwerp. Both the politicians and members of the public were from Flanders, a region in north Belgium.

For policies to increase taxes on short-haul airline tickets and to prevent local authorities blocking windfarms, the Belgian politicians also thought only a minority of the public supported them, when in fact a majority did, underestimating the support by about 25 percentage points. Similar results were found for subsidising solar panels and pricing products according to their environmental impacts.

When the politicians were informed of the true level of support, their estimates of support for further green policies they were asked about were 10 percentage points higher than those in a control group. However, even after these interventions, the politicians still underestimated public support by about seven percentage points, so the misperceptions were not dispelled completely.

“The interventions are competing in an information environment where the politicians are being bombarded with conflicting information and loud opposition,” Tanase said. They told her that in gauging public opinion, they most trusted direct interactions with citizens from their constituencies and their letters, a finding supported by earlier research. “The people more likely to engage with politicians are very specific types politically – they don’t necessarily represent the majority,” she said.

One senior policymaker Tanase spoke to said: “It is plausible that politicians are influenced by the fact that they hear much more from those who stand to lose from green policies than from those who stand to gain.” Other studies have found politicians tend to overrate the public popularity of rightwing policies.

Furthermore, said Tanase: “There is intentional disinformation – there’s a lot of people who have an interest in climate support being muted. There’s a lot of fake news and sensational headlines that we hear and that the MPs will also hear.”

Tanase has already engaged with policymakers in the UK and EU, and prompted a study of perception gaps among MPs in Denmark. She said increasing awareness of the problems in the information environment can make people – including politicians – less vulnerable to misperceptions.

“Showing there is stronger support than assumed could give encouragement that there is public backing [for climate action] and that it’s politically viable,” she said.

EXPORT | DIVERSIFY | GROW

EXPORT | DIVERSIFY | GROW

Oliver Valvetek in Top 50 Most Innovative Businesses

Sign up to the EIC Newsletter