Why Is Air Pollution Not A Political Issue? Evidence From India

Why do citizens in developing democracies rarely consider air pollution to be a political issue? We theorize possible impediments to politicization across three domains: issue awareness, clarity of responsibility, and support for solutions. We conduct descriptive and experimental tests of these impediments embedded in a large citizen survey in the highly polluted megacity of Delhi, India. We identify two key impediments: selective attribution of blame along partisan lines and cost-sensitive support for mitigation policies, while ruling out more anticipated explanations, such as low awareness, prioritization of development over environment, and socially fragmented support for mitigation. We also identify an opportunity to raise pollution's political prioritization via a randomized field intervention that heightens the salience of its inescapable personal costs. Our findings suggest conventional portrayals of voters in developing democracies are inadequate for explaining the low political salience of an acute environmental crisis, instead highlighting threats commonly observed in wealthy