Although environmental issues are widely considered to be pressing social problems across national contexts, researchers have not developed an adequate understanding of the processes influencing the formation of environmental concern, the relative explanatory power of individual-level and contextual-level forces, and the extent to which similarities or differences can be noted across countries with this respect. In my dissertation, I address these issues in a cross-national study of the social forces influencing environmental concern. I am interested in uncovering similarities and differences within and between countries in environmental concern noted globally in recent years. To address these issues, I use data from a cross-national study that includes twenty countries (ISSP Environment Module) and apply appropriate methodological techniques, structural equation modeling and hierarchical linear modeling in particular.
Results indicate striking similarities across countries with regard to the effects of social structure and social psychological predictors. Education, knowledge, and having a biospheric (environment-centered) orientation increase general environmental concern, pro-environmental behavioral intentions, and activism. Extending these results to an investigation of the relationships among general environmental concern, pro-environmental behavioral intentions, and environmental activism again points to some consistencies across countries in the pathways to environmental activism. Results point to strikingly similar general trends: that pro-environmental attitudes influence intended behaviors and activism in many cases, that intentions often translate into political actions, and that efficacy is important to consider in explanations that seek to address the attitude-behavior nexus. The effects of individual-level variables, noted in previous research, largely work through other variables. The role of contextual influences receives some support, as the effects of political and economic arrangements influence the relationships of the individual-level variables on environmental concern. In general, my dissertation contributes to the growing literature on environmentalism as a global phenomenon and to research on democratization processes and environmental issues cross-nationally. I consider my dissertation to be the first step in a larger project in the social sciences that seeks to understand the sources of environmental concern and support for environmental policies in order to describe relationships among individual-level and contextual-level factors as responses to environmental conditions.