Abstract
<p>Climate change confronts democratic governments with a difficult tension between effective climate action, economic prosperity, and democracy. But does this political trilemma also appear in citizens’ regime preferences? This paper examines how perceived climate threat and willingness to prioritize environmental protection over economic growth relate with support for democracy, technocracy, autocracy, and military rule. Using original comparative survey data collected in 2025 across eight European countries, I identify five profiles of regime preferences through cluster analysis and use multinomial regressions to examine how climate attitudes relate to profile membership. I find that low willingness to prioritize environmental protection over economic growth is associated with greater openness to autocratic forms of rule, including military rule, and that this association becomes substantially stronger as perceived climate threat increases. By contrast, when high climate threat is accompanied by high willingness to prioritize environmental protection even at the expense of economic growth, technocratic orientations prevail. These findings suggest that the institutional climate-growth-democracy trilemma may indeed have an individual-level counterpart: climate urgency is associated with different regime-preference profiles depending on citizens’ willingness to trade economic growth for environmental protection.</p>