Common energy price shocks have generated divergent public reactions across advanced democracies: in recent energy crises, some European and Asian publics have rallied behind cutting fossil imports and accelerating renewables, whereas North Americans have become more supportive of expanding domestic fossil production. This project examines how macroeconomic structure, especially dependence on imported fossil fuels, conditions citizens’ responses to energy price volatility and shapes support for climate mitigation.

I theorize the role of “import vulnerability,” structural exposure to volatile fossil fuel imports, in forming policy preferences and present evidence from a case study in Japan. Leveraging regionally divergent electricity price hikes caused by exogenous changes in fossil fuel import costs, I implemented a quasi-natural experiment with a pre-registered online survey (N=2,300) and causal mediation analysis. The findings show that exposure to import-driven price hikes increases support for climate mitigation through two distinct pathways: perceptions of personal benefit (avoiding future energy cost spikes) and perceptions of the national interest (enhancing energy self-reliance). Also, sensitivity analyses show the personal-benefit channel weakens as policy costs rise, while the national-interest mechanism remains robust.

Building on these results, I conduct a cross-national survey experiment in Germany, Japan, Korea, and the United States to test the “import vulnerability” theory in different macroeconomic and political contexts. To address endogeneity concerns and the “black box” between energy insecurity and policy preference formation in prior studies, I estimate path-specific effects of personal-benefit perception and national-interest perception on climate-policy support, using a design-based causal mediation framework with randomized encouragements as instruments.