Research Handbook on Environmental Sociology

348 Pages·2021·4.088 MB·English

by  Axel Franzen (editor), Sebastian Mader (editor)

© Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording,
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Published by
Edward Elgar Publishing Limited
The Lypiatts
15 Lansdown Road
Cheltenham
Glos GL50 2JA
UK
Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.
William Pratt House
9 Dewey Court
Northampton
Massachusetts 01060
USA
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021946165
This book is available electronically in the
Sociology, Social Policy and Education subject collection
http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781800370456
ISBN 978 1 80037 044 9 (cased)
ISBN 978 1 80037 045 6 (eBook)
Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader - 9781800370456
Contents
List of contributors vii
Preface xi
Introduction to the Research Handbook on Environmental Sociology 1
Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader
PART I CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS
1 The development of global CO emissions 5
2
Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader
2 Prices, income and energy demand 22
Brantley Liddle and Hillard Huntington
3 Consistent inequality across Germany? Exploring spatial heterogeneity
in the unequal distribution of air pollution 41
Tobias Rüttenauer and Henning Best
PART II MEASUREMENT, DESCRIPTION AND PRECEDENTS OF
ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN
4 Testing the measurement of environmental concern: how do single
items perform in comparison to multi-item scales? 63
Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader
5 The evolution of environmental concern in Europe 79
John Kenny
6 Where do pro-environmental tendencies fit within a taxonomy of
personality traits? 97
Taciano L. Milfont
7 Climate change knowledge, meta-knowledge and beliefs 116
Helen Fischer and Karlijn van den Broek
PART III THE DETERMINANTS OF PRO-ENVIRONMENTAL BEHAVIOR
8 Environmental behavior: measurement approaches and determining factors 134
Peter Preisendörfer and Andreas Diekmann
9 Non-monetary incentives and energy conservation 151
Ulf Liebe
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vi Research handbook on environmental sociology
10 The collective risk social dilemma 168
Manfred Milinski
11 Heating system choice among Swiss households: determinants and
effects of policy counterfactuals 187
Patrick Bigler and Doina Radulescu
12 Is socially responsible investing (SRI) in stocks a competitive capital
investment? A review of the literature and a comparative analysis based
on the performance of sustainable stocks 216
Ann-Kathrin Blankenberg and Jonas F.A. Gottschalk
PART IV ACCEPTANCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES
13 Public support for climate policy 237
Stefan Drews
14 Climate change denial in Europe 250
Christiane Lübke
15 What determines the attitude–behavior link when voting on renewable
energy policies? The roles of problem perception and policy design 268
Isabelle Stadelmann-Steffen and Philippe Thalmann
16 Support for city road tolls: a question of self-interest? 291
Fabian Thiel
17 Beyond political divides: analyzing public opinion on carbon taxation
in Switzerland 313
Laurent Ott, Mehdi Farsi and Sylvain Weber
Index 340
Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader - 9781800370456
Contributors
Henning Best is Professor for Sociology and Social Stratification at TU Kaiserslautern,
Germany. His research interests include environmental sociology, social inequality, and causal
inference. More information can be found under www. sowi .uni -kl .de/ en/ sociology.
Patrick Bigler is a PhD Student in Economics at the KPM, University of Bern, Switzerland
and the Oeschger Center for Climate Change Research. His research interests are in Applied
Economics with focus on Energy, Environmental and Public Economics. Further information
can be found at http://w ww .kpm .unibe .ch.
Ann-Kathrin Blankenberg is a behavioral economist and (interim) Professor at Bard
College Berlin, Germany. She is also an external fellow at the University of Goettingen. Her
research interests are focused on ecological economics, pro-environmental behavior, identity
economics, industrial dynamics/innovation, self-employment/entrepreneurship, and especially
subjective well-being research. For more information see her website https://b lankenberg1
.webnode .com/.
Andreas Diekmann is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland and
a Senior Professor at the University of Leipzig, Germany (2018 –). His areas of research are
social cooperation and experimental game theory, environmental and population sociology,
and methods of empirical social research. Current research activities focus on the reduction
of energy consumption, an analysis of the environmental burden of metropolitan areas with
geo-referenced panel data and experimental research on social dilemmas and the emergence
of social norms. Website: http://s ozweb .sozphil .uni -leipzig. de/ de/ personen/ prof -dr -andreas
-diekmann. html? duid = 52.
Stefan Drews is a Postdoc at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology,
Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. He is interested in climate policy, ecological
economics, and environmental psychology. More information can be found under https://
ictaweb. uab .cat.
Mehdi Farsi holds the chair of Microeconomics of the Public Sector at the University of
Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His current research focuses on the determinants of energy demand
and behavioral responses to policy instruments, market innovations and new technologies.
More information can be found at https://w ww .unine .ch/ irene/ en/ home/e quipe/m ehdi _farsi
.html.
Helen Fischer holds a postdoctoral fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG)
for stays at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm, Sweden, and the Max Planck
Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany. Her research interests include environ-
mental cognition, and the relationship of metacognition and politicized climate science.
Axel Franzen is Professor for Methods and Statistics at the Institute of Sociology at the
University of Bern, Switzerland. His research interests include methods of quantitative social
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Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader - 9781800370456
viii Research handbook on environmental sociology
research, experimental game theory, and environmental sociology. More information can be
found under www .soz .unibe .ch.
Jonas F.A. Gottschalk is an analyst for equity and debt capital markets at Berenberg (one of
one of Europe’s leading privately owned banks). Previously he was a data analyst for invest-
ment funds and derivates. His work is focused on analysis and support with regard to IPOs
and capital increases of national and international clients, as well as the processing of share
buy-back programs and scrip dividends and employee stock option programs.
Hillard Huntington is Executive Director of Stanford University’s Energy Modeling Forum,
USA, where he conducts studies to improve the usefulness of energy market and systems
models for understanding critical energy and environmental policy options. More information
can be found under https://e mf .stanford .edu/ people/h illard- huntington.
John Kenny is Senior Research Associate at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research,
University of East Anglia, UK. His research interests include environmental public opinion
and political sociology. More information can be found under www. tyndall. ac .uk.
Brantley Liddle was most recently a Senior Research Fellow at the Energy Studies Institute,
National University of Singapore. His research interests include the macro-economy and
energy consumption/carbon emissions, transport and energy, and population and energy/
carbon emissions. For more information, working papers, and pre-prints see: http://s srn .com/
author = 375472 or https://w ww .researchgate .net/ profile/B rant _Liddle.
Ulf Liebe is Professor of Sociology and Quantitative Methods at the Department of Sociology
at the University of Warwick, UK. His research interests include environmental behavior,
sustainability, discrimination, and multifactorial survey experiments. More information can be
found under www .warwick .ac .uk/ fac/s oc/ sociology.
Christiane Lübke is Postdoc at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Duisburg-Essen,
Germany. Her research interests include environmental awareness and risk perception,
pro-environmental behavior and sustainable lifestyles, social inequality, technological change,
and job insecurity. More information can be found under www .uni -due .de/ soziologie/l uebke
.php.
Sebastian Mader is Postdoc at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Bern,
Switzerland. His research interests include environmental sociology, public health, statistical
methods, and experimental sociology. More information can be found under www. soz .unibe
.ch.
Taciano L. Milfont is Reader in Environmental Psychology at the University of Waikato,
New Zealand, where he specializes in a cross-cultural understanding of environmental prob-
lems. He has served as Associate Editor of both Environment and Behavior and the Journal
of Environmental Psychology, and is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.
More information can be found under www. milfont. com.
Manfred Milinski is Professor at the University of Kiel, Germany, and Director Emeritus
at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany. His research interests
include host–parasite co-evolution, the role of immune genetics in mate choice, and experi-
Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader - 9781800370456
Contributors ix
mental economy, especially in relation to climate change and cooperation in social dilemmas.
More information can be found under http://w ww .evolbio .mpg .de.
Laurent Ott is PhD candidate and teaching assistant at the Institute of Economic Research
at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His research interests include environmental
economics, political economy, policy evaluation and quantitative research methods. More
information can be found at https://w ww .unine .ch/ irene/e n/ home/e quipe/l aurent- ott .html.
Peter Preisendörfer was Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Sociology at the University
of Mainz, Germany, retiring in 2019. His research interests include organization studies,
entrepreneurship, environmental sociology, and quantitative methods of social research. More
information can be found under https://o rganisation vonarbeitu ndbetrieb. soziologie. uni -mainz
.de/ professor -dr -peter- preisendoerfer.
Doina Radulescu is Professor for ‘State and Market’ at the Center of Competence for Public
Management at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She is an applied empirical economist
with interests in energy economics and public economics. More information can be found at
https://s ites .google .com/v iew/ doinaradulescu/h ome.
Tobias Rüttenauer is a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Sociology at Nuffield College,
University of Oxford, UK. His research focuses on environmental sociology, spatial demog-
raphy, and the application of statistical methods for spatial and panel data. More information
can be found under https://r uettenauer. github .io.
Isabelle Stadelmann-Steffen is Associate Professor in Comparative Politics at the University
of Bern, Switzerland. Her research interests include comparative public policy (especially
welfare state and energy), direct democracy as well as political behavior and attitudes.
More information can be found at https://w ww .ipw .unibe .ch/ ueber _uns/ personen/ prof _dr
_stadelmann_ steffen _isabelle/i ndex _ger .html.
Philippe Thalmann is Associate Professor with tenure for urban and environmental econom-
ics at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. His research interests include
climate policy, macro-economic modelling and micro-economic decision making. More infor-
mation can be found under leure.epfl.ch.
Fabian Thiel is Research Associate at the Institute of Sociology at the LMU Munich,
Germany. His research interests include methods of quantitative social research, social ine-
quality (esp. discrimination), and environmental sociology. More information can be found
under www .soziologie. uni -muenchen. de.
Karlijn van den Broek is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Copernicus Institute for Sustainable
Development at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, as well as Heidelberg University,
Germany. She is an environmental psychologist, and her research focuses on people’s under-
standing of environmental problems (mental models) and how this understanding influences
decision-making and conservation behaviors. More information can be found on: https://w ww
.uu .nl/ staff/ KLvandenBroek.
Sylvain Weber is a Post-doctoral Lecturer and Researcher at the Institute of Economic
Research at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He has a strong expertise in applied
microeconomics and quantitative methods, and his research interests include energy and
Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader - 9781800370456
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labor economics. More information can be found under https://w ww .unine .ch/ irene/e n/ home/
equipe/s ylvain _weber .html.
Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader - 9781800370456
Preface
When the publisher asked us to edit a handbook, we were first reluctant. After all, we, like our
colleagues, are busily involved with publishing new analyses and insights in journal articles.
They have increasingly become the main product of academic research, and handbooks receive
much less attention in comparison to journal articles. However, and hopefully luckily, we had
second thoughts. Journal articles have to be short and often focus on very specific details
within a field. In contrast, contributions to handbooks offer the opportunity for a more general
and review-oriented approach. We believe that this makes handbooks still a valuable supple-
ment to the busy journal publishing. Particularly, handbooks are still often used in teaching
and university classes, and we certainly hope that this one finds its place. We would like to
thank all authors for sparing some time out of their busy schedules and for contributing to this
book. It was written in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. For many of our colleagues,
particularly for those with younger children, this did not facilitate working. We certainly
hope that they are happy with the results and have no regrets. We also owe thanks to Tobias
Rüttenauer who, together with Sebastian Mader, organized a meeting on environmental social
sciences in August 2020 at the University of Bern. As it turned out, this gathering was the best
offline academic meeting (and the only one) we attended that year. It provided the opportunity
to persuade attendants to contribute a chapter and to encourage those who were already com-
mitted. We would also like to thank our student assistants Sophie Meier and Zagorka Nakova
who supported the meeting and helped us to consolidate the manuscript. Finally, our thanks go
to Hans-Peter Blossfeld for recommending us to the publisher and to Daniel Mather of Edward
Elgar Publishing for persistently asking how the book is coming along.
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Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader - 9781800370456
Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader - 9781800370456