Exploring the Relationship Between Social Capital and Individuals' Policy Preferences for Environmental Protection: A Multinomial Logistic Regression Analysis

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of citizens' policy preferences for encouraging pro-environmental behaviour and the influence of social capital. Utilizing a multinomial logistic regression model, this paper aims to answer the following questions relating to citizen involvement in protecting the environment: (1) Do citizens prefer a policy that provides financial rewards for individuals who protect the environment to those that penalize individuals who damage the environment? (2) Do they prefer a policy that focuses on increasing environmental awareness through education to those that penalize individuals who damage the environment? (3) To what extent do individuals prefer punishment as a mechanism to control their behaviour? After controlling for individual characteristics, results showed that people with strong trust for fellow citizens and their government, prefer tax rewards and education to punishment mechanisms to promote pro-environmental behaviour. Results also showed that individuals are more likely to prefer penalty systems when compliance with social norms is motivated by perceptions of a shared burden of financial obligations on the citizenry. Furthermore, the results showed that civic participations generally did not have a statistically significant impact on citizens' policy choices. Implications of the research findings and future research directions are discussed.

Keywords:

• Social capital
• environmentally responsible behaviour
• environmental policy
• social trust
• civic participation

Notes

ERBs are defined in many different ways in the literature depending on the context, which ranges from recycling behavior to consumer purchasing behaviour. Several scholars, however, broadly refer to ERBs as a citizenship behaviour that contributes to the protection of environmental sustainability.

Previous waves of the data have been used many times. The ISSP is an association of survey programmes across nations (e.g. the General Social Survey in the USA and the British Social Attitudes Survey in the UK) that organize global surveys, focusing on a specific social issue each year (www.issp.org). The 2010 ISSP survey included a module of questions related to attitudes towards the natural environment. While we acknowledge that no social survey is flawless, the 2010 ISSP environmental questionnaire data are particularly useful and powerful to an extent because of the inclusion of diverse nations and the large number of questions that are directly related to environmental issues. For a full description of the data set and data collection procedure, see http://www.gesis.org/en/issp/issp-home/.

Although a ‘direct democracy’ is formally known as a form of government that allows people to directly initiate on or respond to policy initiatives (e.g. referendums), scholars (e.g. Dalton, 2008) have recently incorporated such forms of citizen participation as engaging in public demonstration or making political donations for a political cause as legitimate representation of direct democracy also known as participatory democracy.

As an effort to recognize the changing norms of citizenship, Dalton (2008) distinguishes between ‘engaged citizen’ and ‘citizen duty’. While citizenship duty is commonly referred to as compliance to social and legal duty such as obeying the law, reporting a crime, serving on a jury, and voting in elections, ‘engaged citizens’ are described as those citizens who look for ways to directly impact the outcome of public affairs by forming his or her own opinion, being active in politics by membership, and being active in voluntary groups.