Environmental Attitudes and Emancipative Values: Evidence from the European Values Study and the World Values Surveys

Climate change has already impacted the last years of the lives of millions of people. However, many people still do not realize how dangerous the current environmental situation is. Thus, it is important to understand what factors determine an individual's attitude towards the environment and contribute to greater awareness of the environmental situation. The fundamental theoretical concept that explains the mechanisms of influence of some predictors on environmental attitudes is the modernization theory by R. Inglehart and C. Welzel. The purpose of this study is to find out how cultural modernization, understood as the growth of post-materialist and emancipative value orientations, affects environmental attitudes at the individual and the country levels. Commitment to emancipative values at the individual and country levels, education, age, and income are likely predictors of environmental attitudes. The main method of analysis is multi-level regression modeling. The analysis was carried out on two large comparative survey databases - the European Values Study 2017 (EVS) and the World Values Survey 2010-2014 (WVS). The results obtained confirm the presence of a positive relationship between commitment to emancipative values and pro-environmental attitudes, as well as the positive effect of education. For the effects of the remaining predictors, contradictory results were obtained: in the model based on EVS data, income showed a positive effect on pro-ecological attitudes, and in models based on WVS, either the effect was weak and negative, or was insignificant; in the model based on EVS data, age has a negative effect on pro-ecological attitudes, and in models based on WVS, it has a weakly positive effect. Such contradictory results on WVS are largely associated with the heterogeneity of the sample of countries according to these predictors.