Waxing or waning? The changing patterns of environmental activism

Abstract

Is environmental action waxing or waning? Using the environmental modules of the International Social Survey Program from 1993, 2000, and 2010, two dimensions of environmental activism are described: environmental political activity and conservation behavior. Political activity has generally decreased, but in contrast, conservation behavior has become more common over the same time span. The correlates of these changes suggest that broad societal forces produced these trends, since most social groups follow these same trends, although some evidence was found of increased partisan polarization in Green activism.

Keywords:

• environmental movement
• political participation
• protest
• recycling
• conservation

Acknowledgements

An earlier version was presented at the annual meetings of the Western Regional Science Association, Poipu, HI, February 2012. I appreciate feedback I received from the panel participants, as well as Jon Pammett, Robert Rohrschneider, Markus Hadler, and Christian Welzel.

Notes

1. The political representation literature would similarly hold that past progress on environmental reform lessens public support for further action – the so-called thermometer model of political representation (Soroka and Wlezien 2009).

2. Hadler and Haller (2011) use earlier waves of the ISSP to distinguish between public and private examples of activity. In large part, this is a semantic difference, since we are analyzing the same data and combining individual survey questions in the same two clusters.

3. We acquired these data from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research in Ann Arbor and the GESIS archive in Cologne. We are indebted to the principal investigators of the ISSP and these two archives for making these data available. For additional information on the ISSP and copies of the survey questionnaires, see the project Web site: http://www.issp.org

4. Some waves included additional conservation behaviors, but only these two items were consistently asked across all three ISSP waves, so we focus on these for consistency. A separate analysis added several conservation behaviors in the 2010 module, and this produces the same two-dimensional structure with all six conservation items loading on the same dimension (with loading coefficients): recycle glass (0.50), buy organic products (0.62), reduce driving (0.68), reduce energy use at home (0.78), conserve water (0.71), and Green consumerism (0.74).

5. As one would expect, all the variables load positively in an unrotated principal components analysis. However, the wide range in loadings (from 0.42 to 0.71) implies that there are important subdimensions of activism. In addition, the results are even more consistent if we only compare the results for those nations that appeared in all three ISSP modules.

6. We also tracked the expressed membership in environmental groups between the 2000 World Values Survey and the 2008 European Values surveys, which used comparably worded questions. Across 10 Western European democracies, there was a decline (>2%) in membership in three nations, an increase in one nation, and the remaining nations were within ±2%. These results might moderate our impression of declining group membership at least until 2008.

7. For instance, Van Beukering (2001) showed that the recovery and utilization rate of waste paper in developed countries increased from about 25% in the early 1970s to >35% in the late 1990s. The rate of increase was even greater in developing nations. The APMA (Association of Plastics Manufacturers in Europe) (2004) reported steady increases in the recycling of plastics products in Europe, with the growth rate for recycling exceeding the growth rate for production in 2000.

8. We coded positive and negative responses for each item in an index. Then we added items together and divided by the number of items in the index. This produces an average percentage across the items comparable to the percentages displayed in Figure 1. Individuals with one missing data response on any item were excluded from the index. Because of East and West Germany’s different political conditions pre-1990, we treat these as separate national units.

9. The affluence indicator is gross domestic product per capita in 2000, adjusted for price parity (World Development Indicators database); the Human Development Index is from the United Nations Development Program Web site (http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/). The Freedom House scores and press freedom scores were obtained from the Freedom House Web site (http://www.freedomhouse.org).

10. A previous version of this research showed that the willingness to pay more to protect the environment has also decreased over time as measured by three separate ISSP questions, suggesting a retrenchment of the environmental reform movement:

Table

11. The percentage of post-materialists has increased over these two decades, and this would predict that both political action and conservation behavior should have increased. Instead, the two indices moved in opposite directions.

12. We do not provide a separate table of the distribution of the variables in the model; this information is available from the author on request.

13. To our knowledge, this is the only use of this methodology in the public opinion literature. The use of this methodology requires listwise regression analyses, which substantially lowers the total N, and like all regressions, there is a possibility of change by adding (or subtracting) independent variables from the model. However, this method seems more robust than separate bivariate relationships as in Tables 4 and 5.

14. If the time series began in the 1970s, multiple studies suggest that present levels of activism remain higher than during that decade (Rucht and Roose 2001, Rootes 2007). There is some evidence that reported group membership has increased in some nations, but one cannot tell if this is because of multiple memberships by a smaller number of individuals.