Attitudes towards the environment: are post-Communist societies (still) different?

Abstract

The causal processes that shape the emergence of environmental attitudes in post-Communist Europe are examined. We describe the widening gap in environmental policy orientations between West and East, and then cite two factors to explain the lower support for environmentalism in this region: first, citizens still evaluate environmental issues through a distinctive ideological lens carried over from the Communist era; and, second, they do not connect environmental issues to other (more salient) economic and political questions in a consistent way. Using the three waves of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) environmental module, these questions are explored with individual-level and multilevel models. It is concluded that the post-Communist effect is unlikely to disappear until environmental issues comprise a component of citizens’ ideological orientations and the programmes of political parties.

Keywords:

• post-Communist societies
• environmental attitudes
• political culture
• Europeanisation

Notes

1. The HDI is a composite of various indicators, including life expectancy and income indices. For a more detailed description of the components of the Index, see http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/hdi/ (accessed 18 January 2012).

2. The following table presents HDI scores by region for 1995 and 2011.

Table

3. There is a significant body of work that has examined this question at the global level. For example, see Rohrschneider et al. (2014).

4. For a full discussion of this literature and how it applies to the post-Communist region, see the variety of contributions to Whitefield (2005).

5. Responses to all five questions loaded on to one factor in an explanatory factor analysis and had a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient >0.6. We conducted a separate factor analysis in each ISSP year. The factor structure for the pooled set of nations in the 2010 ISSP is as follows:

Table

6. These results are robust to differences in the composition of countries in different surveys over time and are not affected by any peculiar former Soviet Union effect. When the analysis is run on a subset of states that are present in all waves, the results are substantively unchanged. The same is true when former Soviet states are excluded from the set of post-Communist states. The robustness of the results, of course, speaks to the robustness of the finding that post-Communist states are (still) different.

7. For a good summary of this literature, see Marquart-Pyatt (2008).

8. These analyses are based on a multilevel model of national and individual-level variables. For additional information on multilevel modelling and its statistical complications, see Snijders and Bosker (1999). We used Stata to estimate these models.

9. See Gallagher (1991).

10. The full results are available from the authors upon request.