Do ‘Greener’ Voters Support ‘Greener’ Parties? A Large-scale Comparative Study of Pro-environmental Attitudes and Behaviour

This paper investigates the magnitude with which the voters’ environmental attitudes affect environmental action, namely their votes at parliamentary elections. It is expected that ‘greener’ voters chose parties with ‘greener’ party programmes, and that exposure to bad environmental conditions and higher income further strengthens this effect. The analysis relies on the European Social Survey, the World Values Survey, the Manifesto Project Database, the EM-DAT dataset, as well as World Bank data, and covers 37 countries and 102 elections between 1995 and 2016. It is found that, on the one hand, 'greener' voters indeed chose 'greener' parties. On the other hand, on some occasions, exposure enhances the green vote even in the groups characterised by weaker pro-environmental attitudes, and larger income enables citizens to vote in line with their attitudes to a greater extent than small income voters.