In Gov we Trust : Are Trust and Political Ideology Important Factors of Public Acceptance for Environmental Policies?

Several environmental policies are efficient in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However these policies remain still very unpopular among the public and climate issues often provide ideal targets for populists who frame these issues as elite matters. In this current paper we attempt to answer the following question : are environmental issues a matter of elites? We conjecture that this is not necessarily the case but that there exists several factors that may refrain the poorest and less educated individuals from accepting environmental policies. The first explanation relies on the household’s budget constraint and the fact that high income and high educated individuals are in a better financial position to accept costly environmental policies. This explanation relates to the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that stipulates that individuals must have fulfilled lower needs before addressing higher levels of needs such as environmental issues. The second explanation is that education may affect support of environmental policies indirectly by reducing ignorance and mistrust, which constitute key barriers to public acceptance of environmental policies. We ran an empirical analysis based on the data from the European Social Survey (2016). We find that higher educated and income individuals are more likely to favor most of environmental policies, suggesting that educational background play both a direct and an indirect role. We also find that both mistrust in institutions and right wing populism, as proxies of skepticism constitute important barriers to most of environmental policies.