Culture, Politics and Mass Publics: Traditional and Modern Supporters of The New Environmental Paradigm In Japan and the United States

Abstract

This paper examines the putative link between Postmaterial values and the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) among mass publics in Japan (Shizuoka Prefecture) and the United States (Spokane, Washington). Unlike Western postindustrial nations, in Japan support for environmentalism comes from two distinct sources--one traditional and the other modern. In Japan, materialist supporters of the NEP are generally indistinct from materialist nonadherents to the NEP, but they are quite distinct in political and personal attributes from the postmaterialist supporters of the NEP. In the U.S., in contrast, the materialist NEP support group is indeed distinct from both the materialist non-NEP group and from the postmaterialist pro-NEP group. This pattern of findings is attributed to the traditional Japanese view of the unity of nature and humans, a view that is mirrored in the New Environmental Paradigm. Unlike the United States, then, in Japan the New Environmental Paradigm is not really all that new.