Support for environmental protection: an integration of ideological-consistency and information-deficit models

ABSTRACT

The divergent roles of education in predicting environmental support among liberals, conservatives, and moderates in the United States are explained by integrating ideological-consistency and information-deficit models. Increased political polarization among elites has led to divergent environmental positions advocated by liberal and conservative political and media leaders; it was predicted that education would increase public attention to these elite cues and, consistent with the ideological-consistency model, increased education would lead to attitudes in line with consensual positions endorsed by party elites. Across two nationally representative data sets, higher levels of education were associated with stronger environmental support among liberals and weaker environmental support among conservatives. Moderates were predicted to have fewer elite cues on which to base their attitudes; consistent with the information-deficit model, higher levels of education among moderates were associated with strengthened environmental support. A moderated-mediation model supported the differential application of these two theories.

KEYWORDS:

• Ideological consistency
• information deficit
• environmental support
• partisans
• moderates

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Eric Smith for his thoughts and guidance throughout the project, as well as Sarah Anderson, Matthew Potoski, Leaf Van Boven, Cameron Brick, and the attendees at the 3rd Annual UCSB Environmental Politics Conference for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. We use the term partisan for individuals who self-report strong ideological preferences (i.e., self-identifying as a conservative or a liberal). See the Measures section for the description of this operationalization.

2. In the United States, moderates are typically individuals who do not strongly identify with either liberal or conservative ideology, and often view themselves as ‘middle of the road’ on the left–right ideological spectrum.

3. For Democratic Senate Leaders in the 113th Congress, the average score was 100 (scale: 0–100 with 100 as the most environmentally friendly). In the House, the Democratic average for leadership was 87. Conversely, the average Senate Republicans in leadership scored 5, and their colleagues in the House even lower at 3 (League of Conservation Voters 2013).

4. Supplemental material is available at http://www.phillipehret.com/Publications/.

5. We also conducted a series of supplementary models to support the robustness of the education by ideology interaction (see supplemental material for all additional models and relevant statistics). There was no significant impact on the results depending on the treatment of the variables (continuous vs. categorical) or exclusion of covariates.

6. We also conducted an additional model that excluded those identifying as slightly liberal or slightly conservative (see supplemental material). This provided a stricter test of moderates. For all models, the pattern of results was largely unaffected.

7. When interpreting percent of variance explained, it is important to recognize that 80% of variance explained is typically considered complete mediation, so although these numbers are not near complete mediation, they are still accounting for a sizable amount of the variance of the education by ideology interaction for partisans.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the University of California, Santa Barbara Crossroads Fellowship.