Right-Wing Stewards: The Promoting Effect of Religiosity on Environmental Concern Among Political Conservatives in A Global Context

Abstract

This article studies the relationship between individuals’ religiosity, political ideology, and environmental concern, in a cross-national setting. Drawing data from multiple waves of the World Values Survey (1999-2009), the final sample of this study includes 44,391 respondents nested in 43 countries. By using a multi-level modeling technique, I find that, in general, religiosity is positively associated with respondents’ environmental concerns in terms of willingness to pay for the environment, agreement with increased taxes to prevent environmental pollutions, and choosing environmental protection over economic interests. Political ideology, measured via individuals’ self-placement on a left-right continuum, does not have a meaningful relationship with environmental concern in a global setting. Nevertheless, I observe an interaction effect between religiosity and political ideology. Increased religiosity, particularly among more conservative individuals, is associated with a higher probability of environmental concern. Comparatively, religiosity virtually does not affect liberals’ concern for the natural environment. In other words, the gap between liberals and conservatives regarding the natural environment is more pronounced at lower levels of religiosity; as religiosity increases, the gap starts to narrow. Results suggest that religion has the potential to elevate some of the political barriers on the way towards reaching a collective environmental consciousness.

Differential impact of prescriptive norms in the intergenerational transmission of environmental concern in a non‐Western context: Evidence from the Philippines

“…Note that the three‐way interaction was the main interest of the present study. Guided by previous evidence on their influence on people’s environmental concern (Cruz, 2017; Hekmatpour, 2020; Mueller & Mullenbach, 2018; Wang et al., 2020), religiosity, ß = −.02, SE = .02, t = −.84, p = .3989, 95% CI [−0.05, 0.02], and political attitudes, ß = .05, SE = .02, t = 1.90, p = .0587, 95% CI [−0.002, 0.09], were set as covariates to control for their effects.…”