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"Fairbrother, Malcolm"
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Public opinion about climate policies: A review and call for more studies of what people want
Around the world, most people are aware of the problem of climate change, believe it is anthropogenic, and feel concerned about its potential consequences. What they think should be done about the problem, however, is less clear. Particularly due to widespread support among policy experts for putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions, more studies have investigated public attitudes towards carbon taxes than any other type of policy. Such studies have found substantial public opposition to carbon taxes, largely due to political distrust, though also some evidence that careful design and messaging can mitigate people’s skepticism. Surprisingly few studies have investigated attitudes towards other climate policies, and there is an urgent need for more research about what—given their beliefs about the nature and severity of the problem—people would like to see their governments doing. This is especially the case for residents of lower-income and/or non-Western nations.
Journal Article
When Will People Pay to Pollute? Environmental Taxes, Political Trust and Experimental Evidence from Britain
This article presents results from survey experiments investigating conditions under which Britons are willing to pay taxes on polluting activities. People are no more willing if revenues are hypothecated for spending on environmental protection, while making such taxes more relevant to people – by naming petrol and electricity as products to which they will apply – has a modestly negative effect. Public willingness increases sharply if people are told that new environmental taxes would be offset by cuts to other taxes, but political distrust appears to undermine much of this effect. Previous studies have argued that political trust shapes public opinion with respect to environmental and many other policies. But this article provides the first experimental evidence suggesting that the relationship is causal, at least for one specific facet: cynicism about public officials’ honesty and integrity. The results suggest a need to make confidence in the trustworthiness of public officials and their promises more central to conceptualizations of political trust.
Journal Article
Two Multilevel Modeling Techniques for Analyzing Comparative Longitudinal Survey Datasets
Increasing numbers of comparative survey datasets span multiple waves. Moving beyond purely cross-sectional analyses, multilevel longitudinal analyses of such datasets should generate substantively important insights into the political, social and economic correlates of many individual-level outcomes of interest (attitudes, behaviors, etc.). This article describes two simple techniques for extracting such insights, which allow change over time in y to be a function of change over time in x and/or of a time-invariant x. The article presents results from simulation studies that assess the techniques in the presence of complications that are likely to arise with real-world data, and concludes with applications to the issues of generalized social trust and postmaterialist values, using data from World/European Values Surveys.
Journal Article
Geoengineering, moral hazard, and trust in climate science: evidence from a survey experiment in Britain
Geoengineering could be taken by the public as a way of dealing with climate change without reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This paper presents the results of survey experiments testing whether hearing about solar radiation management (SRM) affects people’s support for taxing polluting energy and/or their trust in climate science. For a nationally representative sample of respondents in Britain, I found that receiving a brief introduction to SRM had no impact on most people’s willingness to pay taxes, nor on their trust in climate science. Hearing about this form of geoengineering therefore appears unlikely to erode support for emissions reductions. Specifically for political conservatives asked first about paying taxes, moreover, hearing about SRM increased trust in climate science. These and other results of the experiments also provide partial support for the theory that conservatives’ lower trust in climate science generally stems from their aversion to regulatory action by the state.
Journal Article
Trust and Public Support for Environmental Protection in Diverse National Contexts
Worldwide, most people share scientists' concerns about environmental problems, but reject the solution that policy experts most strongly recommend: putting a price on pollution. Why? I show that this puzzling gap between the public's positive concerns and normative preferences is due substantially to a lack of trust, particularly political trust. In multilevel models fitted to two international survey datasets, trust strongly predicts support for environmental protection within countries and, by some measures, among countries also. An influential competing theory holds that environmental attitudes correlate mostly with left versus right political ideology; the results here, however, show that this correlation is weaker and varies substantially from country to country--unlike that with trust. Theoretically, these results reflect that environmental degradation is a collective action problem and environmental protection a public good. Methodologically, they derive from the more flexible application of multilevel modeling techniques than in previous studies using such models.
Journal Article
Fixed and random effects models: making an informed choice
This paper assesses the options available to researchers analysing multilevel (including longitudinal) data, with the aim of supporting good methodological decision-making. Given the confusion in the literature about the key properties of fixed and random effects (FE and RE) models, we present these models’ capabilities and limitations. We also discuss the within-between RE model, sometimes misleadingly labelled a ‘hybrid’ model, showing that it is the most general of the three, with all the strengths of the other two. As such, and because it allows for important extensions—notably random slopes—we argue it should be used (as a starting point at least) in all multilevel analyses. We develop the argument through simulations, evaluating how these models cope with some likely mis-specifications. These simulations reveal that (1) failing to include random slopes can generate anti-conservative standard errors, and (2) assuming random intercepts are Normally distributed, when they are not, introduces only modest biases. These results strengthen the case for the use of, and need for, these models.
Journal Article
The Random Effects in Multilevel Models: Getting Them Wrong and Getting Them Right
Many surveys of respondents from multiple countries or subnational regions have now been fielded on multiple occasions. Social scientists are regularly using multilevel models to analyse the data generated by such surveys, investigating variation across both space and time. We show, however, that such models are usually specified erroneously. They typically omit one or more relevant random effects, thereby ignoring important clustering in the data, which leads to downward biases in the standard errors. These biases occur even if the fixed effects are specified correctly; if the fixed effects are incorrect, erroneous specification of the random effects worsens biases in the coefficients. We illustrate these problems using Monte Carlo simulations and two empirical examples. Our recommendation to researchers fitting multilevel models to comparative longitudinal survey data is to include random effects at all potentially relevant levels, thereby avoiding any mismatch between the random and fixed parts of their models.
Journal Article
The effect of trusting contexts in social dilemmas with collective and individual solutions
Trust encourages members of communities to cooperate and provide public goods. However, the literature has yet to fully investigate how high and low trusting communities deal with collective action dilemmas with multiple solutions. The latter may raise the risk of coordination failure. Using a preregistered interactive experiment (N participants/groups = 371/70), we investigated people’s decisions when they have three possible choices in confronting a collective action dilemma: investing in an individual solution, investing in a collective solution, and free-riding. We manipulated the incentives for trusting and trustworthy interactions among community members, and, consistent with our expectations, we found that people in high-trust contexts invest more in collective solutions, compared to people in low-trust contexts. In the latter case, participants opted more for individual solutions, using resources less efficiently. However, we found no difference in the prevalence of free-riding in high- compared to low-trust contexts.
Journal Article
Conditions for environmental success: dioxin pollution, the swedish pulp and paper industry, and a middle-range theory
Whether environmental sustainability is possible under capitalism is a highly divisive question for environmental scholars and advocates. Within sociology, this divide is reflected in an enduring debate between a Treadmill of Production (TOP) theory predicting worsening environmental problems under capitalism, and an Ecological Modernization (EM) perspective which provides reasons to expect improvements. Empirical support exists for both perspectives, and a synthesis remains elusive, with the only serious attempt at reconciliation a paper by Shwom (2011), which specified conditions favorable to either outcome. We assess Shwom’s model through a case study of the Swedish pulp and paper industry’s successful reduction of dioxin emissions, and chlorinated waste in general. Though we argue that the case largely supports the model’s expectations, it also suggests a need for one modification. Specifically, in the case we examine, industry unity facilitated rather than obstructed environmental improvement, with the corporatism of Swedish capitalism playing a constructive role. This modest critique aside, we endorse Shwom’s model, and recommend it as a useful way of understanding variable environmental outcomes, including in diverse national contexts. We argue for more such nuanced, middle-range analyses.
Journal Article