The Role of Government in Protecting the Environment: Quality of Government and the Translation of Normative Views about Government Responsibility into Spending Preferences

Abstract

While it is becoming increasingly evident that environmental problems such as climate change and global warming constitute existential threats to human societies, these problems will very likely persist and even intensify unless governments enact effective and potentially costly environmental policies. However, government policies and spending ultimately rely on public support, thus underscoring the need to increase present knowledge about the processes underlying citizens' policy attitudes. In this study, we focus on the relationship between citizens' normative views about government responsibility and their support for government spending on the environment. While people who think that, as a general principle, it ought to be the government's responsibility to protect the environment should be more likely to support increasing government spending on the environment, we argue that this relationship is dependent on the quality of government. Using multilevel analysis and data from the most recent ISSP “Role of Government” module, we show that people who think that it is the government's responsibility to protect the environment are more likely to support increasing government spending on the environment in countries where government institutions are fair, effective, and non-corrupt. This suggests that the role of government in protecting the environment stretches far beyond designing effective environmental policies, since an overall ineffective and corrupt government appears to undermine public support for critical environmental policymaking.