The relationship between the youth-led Fridays for Future climate movement and voting, politician and media behaviour in Germany

Abstract

We study the relationship between the Fridays for Future climate protest movement in Germany and citizen political behaviour. In 2019, crowds of young protesters, mostly under voting age, demanded immediate climate action. Exploiting cell-phone-based mobility data and hand-collected information on nearly 4,000 climate protests, we created a highly disaggregated measure of protest participation. Using this measure, we show that Green Party vote shares increased more in counties with higher protest participation (n = 960). To address the possibility of non-random protest participation, we used various empirical strategies. When we examined mechanisms, we found evidence for three relevant factors: reverse intergenerational transmission of pro-environmental attitudes from children to parents (n = 76,563), stronger climate-related social media presence by Green Party politicians (n = 197,830) and increased local media coverage of environmental issues (n = 47,060). Our findings suggest that youth protests may initiate the societal change needed to overcome the climate crisis.