Environmental Attitudes in Europe: Investigating Post-Communist Countries

The contemporary cross-national research of environmental attitudes often ignores the cultural specificity of certain regions and countries. The present paper studies whether post-communist societies are different in their level of environmental concern compared to non-post-communist states in Europe. The data for the analysis comes from the latest wave of the European Values Study (2017–2020). The results of the multilevel modeling suggest that post-communist countries are less pro-environmental than Western European societies. The reasons include 1) the low distribution of postmaterialist values, 2) the low democracy level, and 3) the ambiguity of environmental protection’s position among the political spectrum in post-communist societies. Nevertheless, the results also show that the members of the European Union are, on average, more concerned with the environment than its non-members within the post-communist space.