What’s trust got to do with it? Political trust, polarized opinions and climate protest in Europe

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By Louisa Parks

The Horizon Europe project Activating European Citizens’ Trust in Times of Crisis and Polarisation (ActEU) examines questions of political trust and democratic legitimacy in Europe. This article is part of a series in which ActEU researchers present their findings.

“Protesters – whether they are climate sceptics or pro climate justice – are not necessarily always distrustful of political actors.”

Existing scholarship has shown that European citizens’ views about climate change are increasingly polarised, but not between climate believers and climate denialists (i.e. those that do and do not believe in the existence of human-driven climate change). In Europe the picture is more nuanced. While the vast majority of Europeans accept the existence of human-driven climate change, we do still disagree in important ways over policies: their type, extent, speed, and, crucially, costs and who should pay (Caldwell, Cohen, and Vivyan 2024).

Yet this view is missing in research looking at how polarization on climate change relates to political participation choices and political trust. Usually, it is assumed that environmentalists are more trustful of political actors, and climate sceptics less so. But do these assumptions still hold if we look at climate polarization using a policy lens, rather than a believers-vs-denialists lens? And what does this mean for political participation choices, especially the choice to engage in protest?

For the ActEU project, we thus investigated these interrelationships on the basis of a different operationalisation of polarization that is closer to what we know about citizens’ views on climate change in Europe. Rather than deniers (a small minority) vs. believers (a broad and varied majority), we looked instead at political trust and participation choices amongst supporters of climate justice on the one hand, and climate sceptics on the other.

Climate sceptics vs climate justice actors

For our purposes, climate scepticism groups denialists, but also those who question whether climate change is harmful or human-driven, or question the need for climate change to be responded to through policies.

To define the opposite pole, we follow work on environmental and climate justice. Supporters of climate justice are more than advocates for strong climate action. They underline the ways in which the impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss and other environmental crises are experienced to different degrees according to wealth, class, gender, ethnicity, geography, and more. They thus advocate for holistic approaches to climate change as a social justice issue, and challenge dominant environmental political discourses that shape action in Europe including the European Green Deal (Machin 2025). This often amounts to calls for system change involving more substantive democratic participation elements.

In this article, I discuss some preliminary findings about polarized actors – climate justice actors and climate sceptics – and their political trust and participation choices, drawing on a first exploration of social media data from X collected during the project. This was exploratory work on a fairly limited sample of accounts in European countries. I then offer some reflections about what the findings might mean for EU politics and democracy.

Political distrust among polarized actors

To start looking at political trust among climate justice and climate sceptic actors, we identified X accounts held by environmentalist groups, then researched these to identify those among them that advocate for climate justice. We then looked at the machine analysis of their messages and how these had been tagged as expressing political trust or political distrust.

A first point of interest to note is that when we looked at the whole group of environmentalist accounts including both more ‘mainstream’ groups and climate justice groups, we found no clear trends about political trust or distrust. In other words, simply being an environmentalist group doesn’t seem to carry and implications about political trust.

Climate justice actors express less trust than mainstream groups

However, if we separate this broader group into mainstream and climate justice groups, a trend emerges. Mainstream groups (for example Bird Life groups, WWF, or the World Water Council) write messages that express political trust, for example by describing political actors as honest, competent, and public-oriented. What’s more, these mainstream groups write fewer messages that express political distrust, presenting political actors as dishonest or incompetent. (The way the ActEU project conceptualises trust uses specific descriptions for trust and distrust, rather than using the more common approach where trust is measured, but distrust is seen as just the absence of trust).

Climate justice groups (like Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, or Last Generation), on the other hand, are less likely to write messages expressing trust in political actors, and more likely to write messages describing political actors as dishonest and incompetent. Approaching polarization on climate change issues in Europe using climate justice and climate sceptic groups thus seems to be on the right track: using this approach, we can identify findings about political distrust among supporters for far-reaching action on climate issues that would be obscured by considering all environmentalist groups together.

Climate sceptics are difficult to identify – and surprisingly trustful

While these findings on political trust among climate justice and mainstream environmentalist groups confirm what is already suggested in the literature (e.g. de Moor et al. 2020), what we found when looking at climate sceptic accounts was more surprising.

First, there are challenges in identifying climate sceptic actors. While climate justice and environmentalist groups are clearly organised around their actions in support of the fight against climate change, those acting to obstruct action on climate change are much less overt. In Europe today, climate scepticism has been found to be linked to right-wing populist and far-right political organisations and parties. Yet among these, there is great variation on the public reasoning about climate scepticism (as investigated in-depth elsewhere in the project).

To get a more accurate list of climate sceptic accounts, we thus decided that rather than assuming accounts from this part of the political spectrum to be climate sceptic, we would look at levels of interaction and distance between them and our climate accounts. This was decided in line with the architecture of X, which shows clear patterns of isolated networks around climate positions as well as being known as a space of antagonistic exchange, particularly in recent years (Falkenberg et al 2022). To find climate sceptics, it thus seemed logical to look at whether they had reacted to climate justice and environmentalist messages, as well as those most isolated from them. This left us with a list of accounts that were mostly held by far or populist right politicians, rather skewed to German and Polish accounts. Though far from perfect, we still thought the findings about political trust could provide interesting insights.

What our analysis showed was that these accounts had more messages expressing political trust, and fewer expressing political distrust. So, while our method of finding climate sceptic accounts seems sound in that it tallies with arguments in existing literature, our assumption that climate sceptics are distrustful of political actors is challenged. It may be that this is due to the accounts being held by politicians that were in parliament or governing coalitions at the time.

Polarization, political trust, and protest

Using different data, we also looked at how political trust, positions on climate change, and decisions about political participation are interrelated. Here, what we expect based on existing literature is that protest is linked to both ends of the climate change polarization spectrum. We know that there has been a protest wave around climate justice with the mass demonstrations of Fridays for Future and the civil disobedience of groups such as Extinction Rebellion, peaking around 2019. We also know that there has been rising backlash to climate policy, linked to the populist right, with protests around low emission zones, fossil fuel taxes, and nature protection laws to name but a few.

Is this reflected in survey data? In some ways it is, though the view on what political trust means for protest is mixed. When we looked at the data from the ActEU survey, we found first that respondents expressing trust in members of parliament were more likely to have taken part in protests. When we added polarized views on climate change, the link between political trust and protest participation appeared stronger and covered both climate justice and climate sceptic-oriented positions (though these were captured in a different way in the survey, through questions about the respondent’s opinions on climate sceptic and denialist positions and actors). Our analysis also revealed a higher likelihood for climate sceptics to take part in strikes.

Protesters are not always distrustful of political actors

The ActEU survey also included vignette experiments about protest participation where the respondent is given a scenario in which they are opposed to a climate policy. Here, we found that political distrust was more important in the general relationship between polarization, political trust, and protest. Distrustful respondents were more likely to say they would join a peaceful demonstration or even an occupation of a parliament building (a more contentious option). While it might appear that distrustful respondents are thus protesting against climate policies, when we consider the findings from our social media analysis it could well be that here we are talking about climate justice protests demanding more far-reaching change rather than climate obstructionism, since we found that climate justice accounts are more politically distrustful than many climate sceptic ones.

What this suggests overall is that protesters – whether they are climate sceptics or pro climate justice – are not necessarily always distrustful of political actors. The evidence is much more mixed. This belies some classical academic theories about the link between protest and distrust which attributes the act of protest to those that feel a strong sense of grievance and thus distrust in political actors. Instead, our findings suggest something more nuanced in line with theories around political opportunity. Many protests are about taking advantage of a specific political context to make a claim. There is thus no single pattern or quality to protest, and dismissing it as mere anti-politics or radical flank appears unwise.

What does this mean for EU climate politics?

Our research is far from definitive but bolsters nuanced views in work on social movements and climate change. Both climate sceptics and climate justice actors protest, and there are complex reasons for that.

If we consider recent apparently climate sceptic protests, later captured by right-wing political forces, we can find arguments that concern climate justice. For example, the yellow vests protests and the farmers protests of 2024 contain claims about distributive justice in the transition away from a fossil fuel-based economy (the Just Transition): they are about who should bear costs as well as about climate scepticism.

In climate justice protests, on the other hand, we find clear demands about system change through the addition of mechanisms for participatory democracy in the form of citizens’ assemblies. Sometimes these claims overlap: for example, the yellow vests protests also called for democratic mechanisms, and fed into France’s ‘Grand Débat’ (Ehs and Mokre 2020), while populists also call for elites to listen to ‘the people’.

EU responsiveness to nuanced protest claims can help rebuild trust

Thus, it is important for EU climate politics to take the nuanced nature of protest claims into account. Protest, along with other forms of political claims-making, has always driven change in Europe, and how powers respond to protest has clear consequences.

For the EU, responsiveness to protest through genuine mechanisms of inclusion, and a strong stance against member state moves to repress climate justice protests, could be one key to build legitimacy and democratic credentials. This seems all the more strategic given that more climate sceptic protests linked with right wing populist actors challenge EU policies and the EU’s power, while climate justice protests that are more in line with the EU’s ambitions as a global environmental leader have progressively ceased to address the EU, seeing it as an ineffective actor for real change (della Porta, Parks, and Portos 2024). This is, perhaps, what has driven distrust in politics for supporters of climate justice.

Louisa Parks is Professor of Political Sociology at the Università di Trento, School of International Studies and Department of Sociology and Social Research.

This article is based on the ActEU “Report on variation in political trust across policy areas of climate change, migration and gender” and the ActEU “Report describing the relationships between trust and participation within the fields of immigration and climate change on the basis of web-scraped data and survey experiments”, both published in November 2025.

The final conference of the ActEU project will take place in Brussels on 5 February 2026. Click here for more information and to register.

Economic deprivation reduces political trust [DE/EN] ● Henrik Serup Christensen and Janette Huttunen Multi-level democracy and political trust in Europe: The role of the subnational level [DE/EN] ● Felix-Christopher von Nostitz Out of step? The EU’s difficult election dance [DE/EN] ● Alex Hartland, Daniela Braun, Giuseppe Carteny, Rosa M. Navarrete, and Ann-Kathrin Reinl What’s trust got to do with it? Political trust, polarized opinions and climate protest in Europe [DE/EN] ● Louisa Parks

Pictures: Climate protest: Nick Wood [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0], via Flickr; portrait Louisa Parks: private [all rights reserved].