Are Environment Versus Economy Trade-Off Questions More About Environmental or Economic Attitudes?

Abstract

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.

The Role of Political Attention in Moderating the Association between Political Identities and Anthropogenic Climate Change Belief in Britain

“…Individuals with authoritarian values share the same demographic characteristics as listed for climate sceptics above, with lower education and being older being particularly powerful predictors, and also express lower concern and support for the environment (Flanagan and Lee, 2003). While environmental values have been shown to tap into a different dimension – both theoretically and empirically – than libertarian–authoritarian values (Kenny, 2020; Knutsen, 2017: 14), the effect of libertarian–authoritarian values on climate change beliefs has been much less explored than their effect on general environmental attitudes. Of particular interest in this article is whether such values can explain away the significance of demographic characteristics.…”

“…In Britain, surveys from both 2014 and late 2016/early 2017 show that only 37% and 36% of the population, respectively, believe that climate change is caused either mainly or entirely by human activity (Capstick et al, 2015; Fisher et al, 2018). In other surveys from late 2015 and the first half of 2016 where individuals did not have to assign a degree of human responsibility for climate change, approximately 60% of respondents thought that humans had some responsibility for climate change (Kenny, 2018; 2020). While believing in humans’ contribution to climate change does not automatically equate with supporting mitigation measures – as has been shown in a British study examining the relationship between belief in anthropogenic climate change and support for a net-zero emissions target by 2050 (Fisher, 2019) – individuals who do not believe in anthropogenic climate change are much less likely to prioritise action on climate change (Krosnick et al, 2006; Van Der Linden et al, 2015) given that they either believe it is due to natural factors or even that it is not occurring at all.…”

The politicisation of climate change attitudes in Europe

“…The empirical basis for doing either is thin however. Recent research suggests that environmental and climate change items load onto separate dimensions from other new politics issues (Kenny, 2021;Wheatley and Mendez, 2021).…”

Environmentalism as an independent dimension of political preferences

“…There is already scattered evidence that environmentalism is separable from other dimensions among individuals. In Britain, it has been shown that environmental trade‐off questions load onto a separate factor to both redistribution and libertarian/immigration values (Kenny, 2021b). Factor analyses of a large number of political attitude items in the Norwegian Election Study have consistently found a separate dimension for environmentalism versus economic growth (Bergh & Aardal, 2019).…”