Corruption, Trust in and Environmental Attitudes

• In Event: Influence of Public Trust on Environmental Policy

Abstract

Addressing large-scale environmental problems often requires citizens to coordinate around support for policies and behaviours where short-term personal costs yield long-term collective benefits. Protests against environmental taxes in Canada, Australia and most recently France demonstrate the frequent limits of public support for measures designed to alleviate environmental degradation. The comparative literature on environmental performance has pointed to corruption and lack of trust as common obstacles to the successful implementation of effective environmental policies, yet research on the impact of corruption has developed largely in isolation from the literature on trust, and the relationship between these two variables has not often been explored. This paper develops a theoretical model of support for pro-environmental action in which trust helps citizens to coordinate, but corruption undermines such coordination. Citizens who trust one another are more willing to make personal economic sacrifices for the sake of environmental protection, but this willingness is muted by both a jaundiced perception of leaders as well as by actual corruption. I will test this model on three waves’ worth of World Values Survey data from 95 countries across the globe, combined with relevant aggregate-level data from a variety of sources. In so doing, I will employ multilevel random intercepts and random slopes models, with cross-level interactions between different measures of corruption and trust.

Author

• Sarah Birch, King's College London