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Cohort change and the diffusion of environmental concern: a cross-national analysis

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Abstract

This study explores value change across cohorts for a multinational population sample. Employing a diffusion-of-innovations approach, we combine competing theories predicting the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and environmentalism: post-materialism and affluence theories, and global environmentalism theory. The diffusion argument suggests that high-SES groups first adopt pro-environmental views, but as time passes by, environmentalism diffuses to lower-SES groups. We test the diffusion argument using a sample of 18 countries for two waves (years 1993 and 2000) from the International Social Survey Project. Cross-classified multilevel modeling allows us to identify a nonlinear interaction between cohort and education, our core measure of SES, in predicting environmental concern, while controlling for age and period. We find support for the diffusion argument and demonstrate that the positive effect of education on environmental concern first increases among older cohorts and then starts to level off until a bend point is reached for individuals born around 1940 and becomes progressively weaker for younger cohorts.

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Notes

  1. A diffusion process of environmental values, attitudes, and concerns has also been hypothesized to take place across countries. According to world society theory, international organizations embody, reinforce, and diffuse world cultural norms to regional, national, and local levels (Meyer et al. 1997; Knight and Messer 2012; Schofer and Hironaka 2005). For example, the activities of international environmental and scientific associations, both governmental and nongovernmental, have led nations to adopt environmental treaties and establish environmental ministries and laws (Frank et al. 2000). As such, greater integration into world society has been shown to impact environmental policy and outcomes in countries around the world (Frank et al. 2007; Knight and Messer 2012; Schofer and Hironaka 2005; Shandra et al. 2009). Thus, over the past decades, the institutionalization of environmentalism in a global regime and an increase in pro-environmental discourse has led to the diffusion of environmentalism from the West to less affluent nations (Longhofer and Schofer 2010). However, the focus of this literature on cross-national diffusion differs from our focus on within-nation diffusion across cohorts and cannot be tested with our data and approach.

  2. Albeit a number of scholars have used data from the World Value Survey (WVS) (e.g., Dunlap and York 2008; Givens and Jorgenson 2011; Knight and Messer 2012) to study environmental concern, we follow another line of research (e.g., Franzen 2003; Franzen and Meyer 2010; Mostafa 2011), which has used data from the International Social Survey Project (ISSP). Even though the WVS covers more poor developing countries, the narrower focus of the ISSP sample on countries in the middle to upper range of the income spectrum guards against issues of cultural bias of the employed environmental measures (e.g., willingness to pay). For example, it has been argued that in poor countries, individuals may not have the ability to pay for environmental reforms, yet exhibit concern and sacrifice for the environment in other ways (Brechin and Kempton 1997). By using data from more affluent countries, we avoid this and other cultural, political, and economic complexities that come with a sample of both industrialized and developing nations.

  3. The 18 countries include the following nations: Great Britain, Northern Ireland, United States, West Germany, East Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Russia, New Zealand, Canada, Philippines, Israel, Japan, and Spain. We treat West Germany and East Germany as separate countries due to differences in the historical political context, and exposure to vastly different educational systems and socioeconomic conditions.

  4. A number of studies have employed a willingness-to-pay scale to analyze environmental concern (Kemmelmeier et al. 2002; Marquart-Pyatt 2008). Willingness to pay taps deep-seated beliefs and values, more than views approving of general environmental protection (Inglehart 1995). However, others like Brechin and Kempton (1994) and more recently Dunlap and York (2008) have voiced concern regarding the use of a “willingness-to-pay” scale on the ground that it reflects a western economic measure of worth. However, since our sample constitutes largely of middle- to high-income nations and does not include really poor countries (with the exception of the Philippines), the willingness-to-pay measure represents a meaningful reflection of individual’s environmental concern.

  5. To investigate the psychometric properties of the three dependent variables, we constructed each scale separately by country. Although there is some variation in Cronbach’s alpha values (most notable, low values for Russia on the NEA scale and for the Philippines on the EC scale), the internal consistency is moderate to strong for most countries across scales.

  6. Some individuals in our sample were born before 1900, with birth years starting as early as 1897. However, because of the small numbers, we combined individuals of the cohorts 1897–1900 in the 1900 cohort.

  7. The survey question asked people: “Looking at the list below, please tick a box next to the one thing you think should be your country’s highest priority.” The answer options were as follows: (1) maintain order in the nation, (2) give people more say in government decisions, (3) fight rising prices, and (4) protect freedom of speech. In the following question, people were asked to pick the next highest priority and were given the same four answer choices. Both options 2 and 4 represent post-materialist values.

  8. A number of additional control variables not listed in Table 2 are available in the ISSP data set. However, including variables such as church attendance, political ideology, or community size would have reduced the number of countries used in the analysis due to missing values. We also did not use measures for marital status and employment status in the models because these variables have been shown to be unrelated to environmental concern (Franzen and Meyer 2010).

  9. See Yang and Land (2006: Table 2) for a visual depiction of a two-way cross-classified data structure.

  10. As a robustness check, we also estimated the final models with the continuous, single-year, age variable instead of the 5-years categories. The estimates of the random and fixed effects were similar for both specifications.

  11. To facilitate the interpretation of the interaction coefficients, we grand-mean centered all variables.

  12. Our analysis can be considered stringent because we use a control variable for post-materialism in all models. When post-materialism is removed, the effect of education becomes stronger. We also reran the interaction models including household income as a control variable. The interaction terms remain significant except for the willingness-to-pay scale, for which the Education × Cohort interaction drops below the significant level (b = .027; z = 1.31), while the Education × Cohort 2 interaction remains significant (b = −.005; z = −2.32), consistently demonstrating a concave shape of the investigated relationship.

  13. In order to test the reliability of our findings for each item, we ran fully adjusted interaction models for each of the nine environmentalism measures, include in the three scales, separately. For 7 (78 %) out of the 9 items, the interactions stayed significant. However, no significant interaction effects were obtained for items 4 and 8 (see Table 1 for a detailed item description).

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Acknowledgments

This project received funding and administrative support from the University of Colorado Population Center (NICHD R21 HD051146). Special thanks to five anonymous reviewers for insightful comments and helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this manuscript. We also thank Nancy D. Mann for her careful editing.

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  1. Institute of Behavioral Science, CU Population Center, University of Colorado, Boulder, UCB 483, C435B, 4th Floor, 1440 15th Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, USA

    Raphael J. Nawrotzki

  2. Institute of Behavioral Science, CU Population Center, University of Colorado, Boulder, 1440 15th Street, Boulder, CO, 80302, USA

    Fred C. Pampel

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Nawrotzki, R.J., Pampel, F.C. Cohort change and the diffusion of environmental concern: a cross-national analysis. Popul Environ 35, 1–25 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-012-0182-4

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