Climate Protests Helped the Greens in Germany’s 2019–2021 Elections

“The more powerful the climate protest movement is in a region, the greater the vote gain was for the Greens in elections held from 2019 to 2021,” says ifo researcher Maria Waldinger, one of the study’s authors. She adds that parents who were eligible to vote were apparently influenced by their children who took part in the protests. “In another analysis, we show that the positive causal link between willingness to vote Green and a powerful local protest movement existed only among people with children, not among people who had no children,” Waldinger says. The researchers also looked at politicians’ Twitter behavior and concluded that in response to protests in their constituencies, Green politicians tweeted more frequently about climate change. Coverage of climate change also increased in local newspapers.

Waldinger adds: “In our extensive analysis, we evaluated a variety of data sources, including mobile communications, social media, and newspapers. This means that we can say definitively that Fridays for Future clearly led to political ‘climate change.’ We’re also curious to discover how the protests have affected individual consumer and mobility behavior.”

This article is part of a series on the topic “The Green Transformation in Business and Politics – Where Are the Opportunities and Risks?” Experts from the ifo Institute evaluate climate action measures and present proposals for reforming climate policy in Germany. All articles in the series can be found in ifo Schnelldienst 5/2022.