Attitudes to public spending on environmental risk reduction: the role of temporal and spatial distance

ABSTRACT

Climate change is often perceived as a distant threat affecting people in distant places and the far future. Such perceptions could dampen public willingness to spend on climate change mitigation. We contribute to the knowledge on attitudes to public spending on environmental risk reduction by designing a survey experiment that disentangles two dimensions of distance – spatial and temporal – and examines these dimensions for two different, but related, environmental risks: climate change and air pollution. Consistent with previous research on climate change, we find somewhat more favourable attitudes in scenarios that allow delaying the planned spending. This pattern is, to a degree, present for both types of environmental risks examined. With regards to spatial variation, however, we find that the type of environmental risk being addressed matters for how the public responds to the variations in distance. In the case of air pollution, attitudes to public spending are more favourable in the spatially proximate condition. In the case of climate change, the difference points in the opposite direction. These patterns are strongest in the immediate scenarios, but they also hold irrespective of temporal distance, and can be specific to particular political ideological subsets of respondents.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• air pollution
• public spending
• policy attitudes
• perception

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted at the University in Bergen and the Uni Rokkan Centre in Bergen within the Norwegian Citizen Panel research team during a stay funded by the EEA and Norway Grants scheme 2009-2014. This publication was supported by the The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic- Institutional Support for Longterm Development of Research Organizations - Charles University, Faculty of Arts.

Endre Tvinnereim acknowledges funding from the Research Council of Norway, grant no. 268243.

Some of the data applied in the analysis in this publication are based on ‘Norwegian Citizen Panel Wave 1-67Combined, 2013-2016ʹ. The survey was financed by the University of Bergen (UiB) and Uni Rokkan Centre. The data are provided by UiB, prepared and made available by Ideas2Evidence, and distributed by Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD). Neither UiB, Uni Rokkan Centre nor NSD is responsible for the analyses/interpretation of the data presented here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Case E-7/15, ESA v Norway [2015] EFTA Ct. Rep. 568.

2. The increase was approximately 3% from 1990 to 2017. Source: ‘Kvotepliktige og ikke-kvotepliktige utslipp av klimagasser,’ Norwegian Environment Agency, dated 12 December 2018, https://www.miljodirektoratet.no/no/Tema/klima/Klimagasser/Kvotepliktige-og-ikke-kvotepliktige-utslipp-av-klimagasser/, accessed 14 February 2019.

3. Question codes: w02_km202a to h; original question wording in Online Appendix B.

4. Question code: w02_k207_1; original question wording in Online Appendix B.

5. In the ordinal regression model, however, the coefficient for change in the spatial level is statistically significant (Exp(B)=0,780***). This discrepancy is caused by differences in distributions of answers under these two conditions. Specifically, whereas for global reduction more people have chosen the mid-point category, for reduction in Norway more people decided for slight disagreement, while both of these categories are merged in the binary model. These differences were evident in a series of binary logistic regressions with the dependent variable dichotomized at various cut points.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic; Norway Grants; The Research Council of Norway [268243]; Uni Research Rokkan Centre; University of Bergen.

Notes on contributors

Eva Kyselá

Eva Kyselá is a Junior Researcher at the Department of Sociology at Charles University. Her research interests include public responses to environmental and climate change policies, related theoretical concepts, measurement and methodology, environmentally-significant behaviours, practices and related social institutions, and risk in modern societies.

Endre Tvinnereim

Endre Tvinnereim is Senior Researcher at the Uni Research Rokkan Centre for Social Studies and the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation (CET) at the University of Bergen. His main research interests are cross-national public opinion on climate policies, quantitative text analysis in survey research, and evidence-based evaluations of cap-and-trade and other CO₂ pricing mechanisms. Tvinnereim co-chairs the Climate and Environment section of the Norwegian Citizen Panel. He holds a Ph. D. in Political Science from Harvard University (2005).

Elisabeth Ivarsflaten

Elisabeth Ivarsflaten is a Professor at the Department of Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen. She is the principal investigator of the Digital Social Science Core Facility (DIGSSCORE) and the Norwegian Citizen Panel at the University of Bergen. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford and was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, before joining the University of Bergen faculty. Ivarsflaten specializes in the study of public opinion and political parties. Much of Ivarsflaten’s research, teaching, and writing explores radical extreme right parties and social movements. She has also been engaged for many years in the development and application of innovative survey research.