Europeans' commitment to protecting the environment: a cross-country longitudinal analysis 1990 - 2009
The aim of this research is to provide individual and country-level explanations of Europeans’ commitment to protecting the environment over the years 1990-2009. Cross-country comparisons and longitudinal analyses are undertaken using the corpus of knowledge provided by green thought and democratic...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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University of Southampton
2018
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| Online Access: | https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/429618/ https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/429618/1/GhAnghelescuPhDThesis_ePrint.pdf |
| Summary: | The aim of this research is to provide individual and country-level explanations of Europeans’ commitment to protecting the environment over the years 1990-2009. Cross-country comparisons and longitudinal analyses are undertaken using the corpus of knowledge provided by green thought and democratic theories. The following countries are included in the study: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, West Germany, and the United Kingdom. The analysis is developed gradually, first using individual-level data from a series of repeated cross-country surveys, conducted within the European Values Study (EVS), and then creating a new standalone dataset, by adding country-level measures related to economic development, democratic governance and environmental policies. The focus is not only on identifying the key drivers of people’s commitment to environmental protection, but also on putting these characteristics of the individuals in the context of their country of residence. Public commitment to protecting the environment is measured as willingness of people to give part of their income for environmental protection using an ordinal scale. Thus, a series of ordinal and multinomial multiple regression models are constructed by accounting for individual-level determinants of Europeans’ commitment to making financial sacrifices for environmental protection, in the first phase of the analysis. These individual-level models are developed considering a number of proxy variables related to the theory of ecological citizenship, developed by Andrew Dobson (2000, 2003, 2006, 2007). The second phase of the analysis additionally controls for country-level contextual variables related to the income of a country, quality of democracy and CO2 emissions. The findings show that regardless of the income of a country, the quality of democracy, and level of CO2 emissions, across all 22 ... |
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