The Role of Communist Legacies in Environmental Values and Attitudes

The Role of Communist Legacies in Environmental Values and Attitudes How Communist legacies affect public values, attitude towards the environmental actions, environmental organizations and environmental Politics? A number of influential studies recently proved the impact of historical legacies and, specifically, Communist past on public attitude and behavior (e.g., on populism, corruption, intolerance, inequality) (e.g., by Byssinger, Kotkin, Pop-Eleches, Libman). However, the impact of historical legacies on attitude towards environmental activism (broadly interpreted) was not yet studied. In this study, we use the 7th Wave of World Value Survey that compiles respondents from 66 countries over the period of 2017 to 2023 on various aspects of their daily lives and their perceptions about social, economic, and political norms. We were interested in investigating the impact of historical legacies of Communism on respondents' belief in the importance of the environment, their confidence in environmental organizations, and their active participation in such organizations. The study also controls for democratic institutions, which are the combination of civil liberties and political rights. Historical legacies of Communism are computed as so-called “democracy stock”. Thus, to test the set of theoretical hypotheses, we merge three datasets: the Polity 5 database, World Indicators, and World Value Survey. The multivariate regression analysis with a rich set of variables combined with country fixed effects demonstrate that democracy stock (proxy for historical legacies of Communism), in general, has a positive implication on respondents' belief in the importance of the environment over economic growth. However, the association differs for low-income countries, where the environment has a lesser importance than the policies that bolster economic growth. In general, democratization reduces citizens' confidence in environmental organizations, and this association can mainly be traced to high-income countries. We also performed the multivariate regression analysis with the country-level fixed effects separately for high-CO2 emission countries and low-emission countries. The country that has CO2 emission above the worldwide average value of 5 tons per citizen is classified as a high CO2 emission country. Communist legacies and democratization increases the prioritization of the environment over economic growth in the high CO2 emission countries and reduces it in the low CO2 emission countries. Democratization significantly reduces confidence in environmental organizations in high CO2 emission counties. Finally, democratization per se makes people more active in environmental organizations in the high CO2 emission countries and less active in the low CO2 emission countries. All these results show the importance of institutions in forming public attitudes toward the environment and encouraging civic activism.