Environmental concerns during a time of duress: an introduction

Keywords:

• environmentalism
• global public opinion
• ISSP

Environmentalism began as a populist movement, with public interest groups mobilizing public opinion to pressure governments to enact environmental reform. Public support for environmental issues remains an important part of the current environmental movement. However, researchers continue to debate the breadth, depth, and continuity of citizen orientations toward the environment. There is increasing speculation that the movement has lost its popular vitality as it has become institutionalized, and the 2008 recession may have further eroded public support for environmental action. In addition, there are questions about the cross-national breadth of popular support for environmental reform, especially in less developed and democratizing nations.

The contributors to this volume use new evidence on environmental opinions from the International Social Survey Program to address two broad areas.¹ First, we track the trends in public support for environmental values and participation in environmental activity over time (from 1993 until 2010). One part of the environmental studies literature highlights the expansion of environmental interests and policy reforms over time; the other view suggests that economic recession or the passing of a reformist era has diminished public support for environmental protection. Most survey items were repeated over all three waves, providing a unique base for describing opinion change cross-nationally. Equally important, we can follow the correlates of environmental sentiments, such as generation and education over time to forecast future trends.

Second, we can observe how changing domestic economic conditions influence the way citizens and parties view the importance of environmentalism. Clearly, the massive bailouts in affluent countries and the severity of economic recessions in the West impose considerable strain on national budgets so that policies viewed as non-essential are pushed down the list of policy priorities. Since mainstream parties must be on board for any policy change, the financial problems may well lead to less environmental policy support among centrist parties. In turn, economic recession in the West does not help developing nations to raise levels of affluence to a point where environmental concerns can be redressed.

Our findings, on balance, point to the resilience of environmental concerns in the minds of mass publics. In the affluent democracies, activism is robust (Dalton 2015), albeit changing in its style. We also see subtle evidence in some nations that the economic recession and the rise of anti-scientific beliefs divert attention from environmental issues among citizens and parties (Pammett 2015). In these nations, one can see signs of the adaptation of the environmental movement to changing conditions, rather than systematic growth or decline. At the same time, there is a persisting gap in environmental orientations between established democracies and new and developing democracies. People in developing societies are generally less willing to support international treaties to protect the environment and to pay for environmental protection – a finding that comports with patterns from studies conducted during earlier periods (Çarkoğlu and Kentmen-Çin 2015). Furthermore, citizens in post-Communist countries are no more concerned with the environment in 2010 than they were in the early 1990 (Chaisty and Whitefield 2015) – the efforts by the European Union to harmonize policies across the continent have not led to converging attitudes about environmental protection across the continent. Finally, we note that the institutionalization of environmentalism in party systems has not changed during the economic crisis – parties adopt similar positions on environmental issues in 2013 as they did in 2008 (Rohrschneider and Miles 2015); and citizens in more affluent countries continue to rely on environmental orientations to choose a party during elections, though less so in developing democracies.

The International Social Survey Program environmental modules

The contributions in this volume address these topics with the exceptional resources of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) that has asked about public opinion on environmental matters over time.² The ISSP is a continuing annual program of cross-national collaboration in studying public opinion on topics important for social science research. The project develops a relatively short thematic questionnaire for each module, which is asked in a nationally representative public opinion survey. Most of the ISSP surveys are conducted by pre-existing social science projects, such as the General Social Survey in the United States, ALLBUS in Germany, and the British Social Attitudes survey in the UK. The survey data are then merged into a single cross-national data file and distributed to project participants and international researchers.

This volume is based on the ISSP environmental module that has been conducted three times (1993, 2000, and 2010–11). The number of nations has also expanded over time, from 19 countries in 1993, to 24 in 2000, and 39 in 2010–11 (Table 1). The set of nations now includes a large number of established democracies, more than a dozen nations from Central and Eastern Europe, and a varied set of other nations such as China, the Philippines, and several third-wave democracies. The recent release of the 2010–11 module is the basis for this overview of some of the most important patterns in these surveys.

Table 1. Nations in the ISSP environmental modules.

Nation	1993	2000	2010
Argentina			X
Austria		X	X
Belgium-FL			X
Bulgaria	X	X	X
Canada	X	X	X
Chile		X	X
Croatia			X
Czech Republic	X	X	X
Denmark		X	X
Finland		X	X
France			X
Germany	X	X	X
Great Britain	X	X	X
Hungary	X
Ireland	X	X
Israel	X	X	X
Italy	X
Japan	X	X	X
Korea, South			X
Latvia		X	X
Lithuania			X
Mexico		X	X
Netherlands	X	X
New Zealand	X	X	X
Norway	X	X	X
Philippines	X	X	X
Poland	X
Portugal		X
Russia	X	X	X
Slovak Republic			X
Slovenia	X	X	X
South Africa			X
Spain	X	X	X
Sweden		X	X
Switzerland		X	X
Taiwan			X
Turkey			X
United States	X	X	X

Source: 1993, 2000, and 2010 ISSP; X denotes inclusion in this module.

The 1993 survey began the ISSP’s focus on environmental issues when the thematic module focused on environmental opinions: questions on the salience of environmental issues, the trade-offs between environmental protection and economic growth, and perceptions of science and its relationship to the environment. Other items asked about the respondents’ perceptions of the quality of the various aspects of the national environment in their country, and position on salient environmental issues, such as nuclear power. A battery of questions tapped activism on the environment and the willingness to engage in conservation behavior. The survey also had a set of standard questions on political values and general political orientations. Most of these questions were replicated in 2000 and 2010, but the ISSP also has a norm to rotate in a significant number of new questions in each module. In the 2010 survey, for example, this included additional questions on global climate change. Given this rich source of information about public opinion cross-nationally, we believe that this symposium is a valuable introduction to the new findings from the ISSP. At the same time, we only touch the surface of the rich empirical findings embedded in these surveys. Fortunately, they are available free to the research community to continue the analyses we begin here.

This volume

We assembled a distinguished international team from the ISSP project to analyze environmental attitudes and action. Our objective was to use the unique resources of the ISSP surveys to address some of the pressing questions about changes in environmental attitudes over time, and the patterns of environmentalism across nations.

The volume begins with two contributions focusing on changes in environmental attitudes over time. That by Russell Dalton uncovers a mixed trend in environmental activity across the three time points. Various forms of Green political activity have generally decreased over time across a range of nations. In contrast, conservation behavior has become more common over the same period. The correlates of these changes suggest that broad societal forces produced these trends, since most social groups follow these same patterns. Thus, idiosyncratic explanations of the patterns in one nation – which are often offered by the national media or political observers – miss the larger reality that these trends are common across different party systems, economic structures, or the ideology of governments.

Jon Pammett then investigates the extent of public faith in science around the world, and its link to environmental attitudes and behaviors. Among his many findings, he shows that an anti-growth and anti-science sentiment has emerged as the most internally coherent set of attitudes relating to both science and the environment. This development partially explains an erosion in environmental concern in the most recent ISSP survey.

The contributions to the second section of this volume examine the cross-national patterns in environmental opinions in more detail. Although environmental interest and support for environmental protection seems to be a global phenomenon, Green sentiments appear to be spread unequally across nations. For example, Figure 1 plots the level of concern for the environment by national affluence based on the 2010 International Social Survey Program module.³ These data show a very strong tendency for environmental concern to be higher among the more affluent societies measured by Gross National Income per capita/ppp (r = 0.79). The five nations expressing the most concern have an average income of $46,000 in 2010, while the five nations with the least concern have an average income of $16,000. This seems to reinforce the impression that environmental consciousness develops as a function of socioeconomic modernization.

Figure 1. National affluence and importance of environmental issues.

Source: 2010 International Social Survey Program and GNI from the World Bank.

Ali Çarkoğlu and Çiğdem Kentmen-Çin examine the links between economic development, environmental justice, and pro-environmental behavior across the full range of nations in the 2010 ISSP module. They find that people in low-income countries are less supportive of an international agreement that will force their country to take necessary environmental measures. These publics are also more likely to think that the wealthier countries should make more efforts to protect the environment. Citizens of the less developed countries are also less likely to make personal economic sacrifices. Thus, economic and political development appears closely linked to environmental attitudes.

Paul Chaisty and Stephen Whitefield study the causal processes that shape the emergence of environmental attitudes in post-Communist Europe. They cite two factors to explain the lower support for environmentalism in these nations. For one, citizens in post-Communist states still seem to evaluate environmental issues through a distinctive ideological lens carried over from the Communist era. In addition, differences between post-Communist and other states may also be a consequence of the relatively weak connection of environmental issues to other (more salient) economic and political questions. They conclude that environmental support can only be generated by a slow and steady process of socioeconomic modernization in the region.

Finally, Robert Rohrschneider and Matthew Miles then discuss partisan differences in environmental attitudes during the recent economic depression. They find that political parties have changed little in respect of their position on the trade-off between environmental and economic issues between 2008 and 2013. Additionally, when offered a choice among parties, especially when a Green party exists, many citizens still base their party support on environmental attitudes, especially in Western Europe, though less so in Central and Eastern Europe. Thus, the partisan context of a nation shapes the specific representation of environmental attitudes in elections – and this aspect has not changed during the crisis.

All in all, we take away from this volume one overarching lesson. While economic concerns and activism are still high, especially in affluent nations, we see subtle signs that the economic recession has diminished support for environmentalism, even though the representation of environmental interests through parties remains strong in the affluent West. We also continue to observe a gap in the commitment of publics to ecological issues between the citizens of the affluent West and those of the less affluent nations. We wonder how much more clearly we would see this pattern in late 2014 (the time of this writing). If we extrapolate this lesson to the next decade, we may see that ecological issues will continue to be important, but maintaining their salience is likely to require additional efforts by those concerned with making this a cleaner planet.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We thank the principal investigators of the national ISSP surveys for their contribution to this project. In the spirit of international science, they contribute their efforts so that others – such as our group – can utilize this exceptional resource. We especially thank Tom W. Smith and Jibum Kim for their research that informed some of the analyses presented here. Some of the contributions to this volume were initially presented at a Canada–Europe Transatlantic Dialogue (CETD) conference at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and we want to thank the participants of the conference for their comments and advice.

2. Additional information on these surveys and free access to the data are available from the project Web site: http://www.issp.org. We appreciate the efforts of all the national teams that collected these data. However, we are solely responsible for the analyses and interpretations presented here.

3. The ISSP presented eight different policy issues to respondents, and asked each person to identify the first and second most important problem facing their nation. The figure combines first and second responses as a measure of the salience of environmental issues.