Evidence is presented of how the Great Recession affected prioritisation of environmental protection. World Values Survey data from both before the recession's onset and its aftermath shows that increases in unemployment rates had significant, negative effects upon prioritisation of environmental protection while changing growth rates or gross domestic product (GDP) had none. These results hold not only among advanced industrial democracies, but also generalise to Latin American countries. Additionally, the findings offer no evidence that the recession changed the way in which individual wealth relates to the prioritisation of environmental protection. As a strong environmental public opinion is an important factor in the successful implementation of environmental policy, the findings suggest that, if policymakers wish to maintain public support for implementing environmental protection measures, they should prioritise low unemployment over economic growth.

In recent electoral contests, political observers and media outlets increasingly report on the level of "authenticity" of political candidates. However, even though this term has become commonplace in political commentary, it has received little attention in empirical electoral research. In this study, we identify the characteristics that we argue make a politician "authentic". After theoretically discussing the different dimensions of this trait, we propose a survey battery aimed at measuring perceptions of the authenticity of political candidates.Testing our measure using data sets from different countries, we show that the answers to our items load on one latent concept that we call "authenticity". Furthermore, perceptions of candidate authenticity seem to correlate strongly with evaluations of political parties and leaders, and with vote intention, while they are empirically distinguishable from other traits.We conclude that candidate authenticity is an important trait that should be taken into account by future research.

Existing analysis suggests that individuals may reduce their concern for and belief in climate change as a result of macro-economic difficulties. Such conclusions are predominantly based on repeated cross-sectional and pooled data making it difficult to separate out the effects of economic conditions from other explanatory factors. Approaching this question through experimentally priming individuals to feel a certain way about the economy has also proven difficult due to economic perceptions being difficult to alter in a survey setting (Kachi, Bernauer, & Gampfer, 2015). This paper thus investigates a related question on the effect of the salience of economic perceptions on climate change views using an online question-order experiment, whereby salience denotes the prominence of the issue in the mind of the respondent. Respondents were randomly assigned to receiving an economic prompting question before or after being asked about their climate change views. The results show no effect of the prompting on belief in anthropogenic climate change, but they do show an effect of prompting on prioritization of taking urgent action to address climate change. Those with a non-positive view of the economy were less likely to support urgent action in comparison to those who considered the economy to be performing well if they were asked first about their economic evaluations. The salience of economic evaluations and the direction of such evaluations would not be significant if economic evaluations themselves were not important, and thus the findings also reveal that economic evaluations do matter.

Adopting public policies to deliver the ambitious long-term goals of the Paris Agreement will require significant societal commitment. That commitment will eventually emerge from the interaction between policies, publics and politicians. This article has two main aims. First, it reviews the existing literatures on these three to identify salient research gaps. It finds that existing work has focused on one aspect rather than the dynamic interactions between them all. Second, it sets out a more integrated research agenda that explores the three-way interaction between publics, policies and politicians. It reveals that greater integration is required to understand better the conditions under which different political systems address societal commitment dilemmas. In the absence of greater research integration, there is a risk that policymakers cling to two prominent but partial policy prescriptions: that ‘democracy’ itself is the problem and should be suspended; and that more deliberative forms of democracy are required without explaining how they will co-exist with existing forms.

This paper uses panel survey data from 2002-2008-covering a period of economic prosperity and intense economic difficulties-to analyse the impact of changing levels of economic and financial security from the 2008 economic crisis on individuals' environmental protection preferences. Declining economic conditions in the aftermath of the crisis have been thought to produce lower levels of support for environmental protection and previous literature has predominantly supported this claim. Due to the availability of data, most analysis undertaken to date has focused on aggregate changes using repeated cross-sectional data and various economic indicators. Research looking at individual-level change and how individuals' perceptions of changing economic conditions may affect their prioritisation on environmental protection has however been lacking. This paper finds that neither changing economic perceptions nor changing household financial circumstances can account for the decline in environmental protection prioritisation witnessed in the aftermath of the great recession.

Research shows that environmental attitudes can affect support for environmentallybeneficial policies. However, it is unclear whether environmental attitudes can influence support for such policies when they are not being primarily framed through an environmental lens. Using data from the 2011 Irish National Election Study, this paper examines the issue using the case of support for the reintroduction of water charges. This was a contentious issue with debate largely focusing on the proposal as an austerity measure, but the proposal also had environmental implications. The results find that while individuals' willingness to prioritise environmental protection over economic growth did not affect their support for water charges, their willingness to make individual sacrifices for the environment did. Moreover, voters' position on this policy impacted their vote choice. The findings are particularly important given the struggles that governments are facing in implementing environmental taxes and charges.

Environmental-economic trade-off questions are commonly used in survey research as they enable respondents to indicate their environmental protection support in the presence of scarce resources. Thus, they may capture attitudes that are directly related to actual support for the implementation of environmental policies. However, research is lacking on whether these questions primarily capture environmental attitudes or are actually picking up more on the economic dimension of the trade-off. Using data from the British Election Study, this note finds that such questions are primarily measures of environmental protection attitudes. Thus, such measures can be used in survey research to capture environmental protection preferences and, substantively, the findings also suggest that citizens' environmental attitudes are separable from their broader economic attitudes.

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