Is pro-environmentalism a privilege? Country development factors as moderators of socio-psychological drivers of pro-environmental behavior

ABSTRACT

Explaining cross-national differences in individual pro-environmental behaviors is usually grounded in large, heterogeneous data sets. Consequently, research findings may over- or underestimate the effects of environmental variables of interest when analyzing cross-level interactions. This research contextualizes environmental behavior in the European Union, a set of socioeconomically different countries that share a common institutional framework. We explore the effects of country-level drivers on behavior after controlling for individual-level drivers using multilevel regression analysis to estimate the impact of country-level drivers on both the mean behavior of individuals and cross-level interactions. The direct impact of country-level drivers on pro-environmental behaviors was as expected: country affluence and income inequality had positive and negative impacts, respectively, whereas country education level, environmental issues, and cultural values had no direct impact. Nonetheless, in terms of cross-level interactions, country education level increased the effect of perceived behavioral control on behaviors. In Western countries, the influence of country affluence and education level on behavior, operating through social-psychological drivers, maybe underpinned by different socioeconomic mechanisms. Income may not be enough to change perceptions of reality, but income can be transformed into cultural capital that, in turn, may change socially ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• pro-environmental behavior
• country development
• socio-psychological drivers
• environmental attitudes

Disclosure statement

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

Author contributions

All authors have contributed equally to develop the manuscript.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Data for the 28 European Union member states (in 2017) was included: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

2. We studied the internal structure of the pro-environmental scale, finding that public transport use and eco-friendly purchasing reduce resource consumption and eco-car purchasing. If we were interested in the effect of individual-level drivers and social indicators, while controlling for country context, we would have used the factor scores of this four-factor model. However, we are interested in the direct and indirect effect of country-level drivers after controlling for the individual-level drivers and social indicators. For simplicity sake, we focus on the intensity, not the structure, of pro-environmental behavior.

3. The aim was to judge whether the EFA could discriminate among the theoretical constructs obtained from the set of indicators. PCA, one of the most commonly used procedures in EFA (Williams, Onsman, and Brown 2010), was used to identify the factor structure for the set of indicators and factor scores (Hair et al. 1998). We tested for data normality (Hair et al. 1998; Hammer and Landau 1981; Kim 2013) and suitability for factor analysis (Williams, Onsman, and Brown 2010) using the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO=0.87) test and Bartlett’s test (p-value <0.00). We extracted the factors using PCA and the psycho package implemented in the R Environment and Language for Data Analysis (Makowski 2018). Since correlation among factors was below 0.32 when using the oblimin rotation, there was no need to treat the factors as correlated (see Tabachnick, Fidell, and Ullman 2007, 646).

4. We want to thank one anonymous reviewer for pointing us to this new research line.

Additional information

Funding

The project leading to this application has received funding from Generalitat de Catalunya, AGAUR (Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca), consolidated research groups program, reference # 2017 SGR 1056.

Notes on contributors

Öykü H. Aral

Öykü H. Aral is a doctoral student in business at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Spain. She has a degree in industrial engineering and a master’s in business administration (specialism: marketing). Her research interests include responsible consumption and production, sustainable cities and communities, consumer culture, consumer behavior and marketing strategies.

Jordi López-Sintas

Jordi Lopez-Sintas is a full professor in the Department of Business at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Spain. His research focuses on inequality in consumption, particularly the digital divide, the cultural divide, and the leisure divide. He is interested in mixed methods research and the blending of qualitative and quantitative approaches. He is involved in several projects and has published numerous articles on culture, leisure, and the digital technologies.