Cross-national variation in determinants of climate change concern

Lewis, Gregory B.; Palm, Risa; Feng, Bo

doi:10.1080/09644016.2018.1512261

Cited by 126 publications

(106 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…In affluent democracies, ideological cleavages mirror those observed in relation to welfare provision: left-leaning individuals are more concerned about climate change and more in favour of ecological policies than those with right-wing views [30,[44][45][46][47][48]. The main reason for this is that the left-wingers perceive environmental degradation as a logical outcome of relentless exploitation of nature essential for the capitalist mode of production; from the right-wing perspective, admitting the ecological repercussions costs of capitalism weakens their fundamental ideological tenet of supremacy of the market and could provide a justification for heavy government regulations which they resent [44,45]. Related to ideological determinants, environmental attitudes studies have also considered the effects of human values, especially the materialist/post-materialist divides.…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Doing so, only 2% data needed to be imputed, gaining 7.5% complete cases. After imputation, 99.69% (44,250) of the cases had complete information on all 6 items. The advantage of random imputation is that it usually does not strengthen the correlations between the items, which would somewhat penalise the obtained confirmatory factor analysis.…”

Section: Data Sourcementioning

confidence: 99%

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Eco-Social Divides in Europe: Public Attitudes towards Welfare and Climate Change Policies

Otto

Gugushvili

2020

Sustainability

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In the face of accelerating global warming and attendant natural disasters, it is clear that governments all over the world eventually have to take measures to mitigate the most adverse consequences of climate change. However, the costs of these measures are likely to force governments to reconsider some of their tax and spending priorities, of which social spending is the largest expenditure item in developed welfare states. Unless carried out in a way that is considered as fair by most citizens, such trade-off is likely to add a new, ecological dimension to the existing social cleavages in people’s preferences for public provision. Whether or not the possible tensions between the two sets of policies have already resulted in the emergence of a new, eco-social divide in Europe is an open question. In this paper, we hypothesise that there are four distinct attitude groups in relation to welfare and climate change policies, and that the probability of belonging to any of these groups is influenced by individuals’ socioeconomic and ideological characteristics, as well as the country context in which they live. We test our hypotheses using data from the eighth round of the European Social Survey conducted in 2016/17 in multinomial regression models. Results suggest that across Europe people are considerably divided in their support of public welfare and climate policies, but that support for both dimensions is highest in the Nordic countries. At the micro level, we find political ideology and trust in public institutions to be the most important drivers of a newly emerging eco-social divide.

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Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Data Sourcementioning

confidence: 99%

Eco-Social Divides in Europe: Public Attitudes towards Welfare and Climate Change Policies

Otto

Gugushvili

2020

Sustainability

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“…The combination of factors which encourage delinking of extreme events from climate change in Brazil might be unique, but some of these are shared by other countries of the former G-77 block of less developed countries. That includes "rigid" insistence on common but differentiated responsibilities under the UNFCCC (Yeo and Evans 2015), tendencies towards low levels of climate skepticism (Painter and Ashe 2012), and high levels of public worry about climate change (Carle 2015;Lewis et al 2019). Emphasizing the role of climate change in extreme events might still serve to push for national climate policy in countries of the global South, but the need to do so may sometimes appear relatively less urgent, especially considered against other urgent issues of concern and policy opportunities.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nor are Latin Americans as a whole (Carle 2015). Confirming a tendency in surveys spanning decades (Leiserowitz 2007;Lorenzoni and Pidgeon 2006), a 2015 Pew Research Center survey found 75% of Brazilians to express high concern about climate change (Carle 2015), and a 2019 international comparison showed them to be the most climate concerned population in the world (Lewis et al 2019). While there are important, ideological limitations to Brazilian newspapers' climate coverage (Lahsen 2017), US-style climate skepticism is not prevalent in it (Dayrell and Urry 2015;Painter and Ashe 2012).…”

Section: High Public Concern and Low Levels Of Climate Skepticismmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…American scientific thought leaders' climate-stressing messages about disasters are adapted to a context very different from that of Brazil, where the population already expresses exceptionally high levels of concern about climate change (Lewis et al 2019). Ignorance and skepticism about the theory and reality of human-induced climate change have little apparent hold.…”

Section: High Public Concern and Low Levels Of Climate Skepticismmentioning

confidence: 99%

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When climate change is not blamed: the politics of disaster attribution in international perspective

2019

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Analyzing the politics and policy implications in Brazil of attributing extreme weather events to climate change, we argue for greater place-based sensitivity in recommendations for how to frame extreme weather events relative to climate change. Identifying geographical limits of current recommendations to emphasize the climate role in such events, we explore Brazilian framings of the two tragic national disasters, as apparent in newspaper coverage of climate change. We find that a variety of contextual factors compel environmental leaders and scientists in Brazil to avoid and discourage highlighting the role of climate change in national extreme events. Against analysts' general deficit-finding assumptions, we argue that the Brazilian framing tendency reflects sound strategic, socio-environmental reasoning, and discuss circumstances in which attributing such events to climate change-and, by extension, attribution science-can be ineffective for policy action on climate change and other socio-environmental issues in need of public pressure and preventive action. The case study has implications beyond Brazil by begging greater attention to policies and politics in particular places before assuming that attribution science and discursive emphasis on the climate role in extreme events are the most strategic means of achieving climate mitigation and disaster preparedness. Factors at play in Brazil might also structure extreme events attribution politics in other countries, not least some other countries of the global South.

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The influence of countries' climate change‐related institutional profile on voluntary environmental disclosures

2020

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This paper analyzes how the regulative, normative, and cultural dimensions of institutions exert pressure both on companies' decisions to voluntarily disclose environmental information and on the quality of the information disclosed. Prior research has focused on the influence of economic, disclosure, and generic institutional determinants, although little attention has been paid to the analysis of the influence exerted by climate change‐related institutional pillars. The results show that the three institutional pillars have different effects as regards both the decision to respond and the quality of disclosure. The regulative pillar positively influences the response decision but does not influence disclosure quality. The normative pillar positively affects both the propensity of companies to disclose and the quality of the information reported. Meanwhile, the cultural pillar positively influences disclosure quality, but it has no effect on firms' decisions to disclose environmental information. This paper is the first to analyze whether the institutional profile of climate change in different countries influences voluntary environmental disclosures.

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Cross-national variation in determinants of climate change concern

Cited by 126 publications

References 52 publications

Eco-Social Divides in Europe: Public Attitudes towards Welfare and Climate Change Policies

Eco-Social Divides in Europe: Public Attitudes towards Welfare and Climate Change Policies

When climate change is not blamed: the politics of disaster attribution in international perspective

The influence of countries' climate change‐related institutional profile on voluntary environmental disclosures

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