Eco-social divides in public policy preferences: Evidence from Great Britain

Environmental and social policy measures can both complement and contradict each other. Taking into account this dual relation between the two, a number of recent studies have investigated eco-social divides in public policy preferences in European societies. This concept implies the existence of sizable groups of people with distinctive combinations of preferences regarding environmental and welfare issues – i.e. groups that support both types of policies, oppose both, and support one, but not the other. In this paper we explore eco-social divides in Great Britain by using data from the British Social Attitudes survey. More specifically, our aim is to answer two overarching research questions: first, how stable are the sizes of eco-social preference groups over time? Second, to what extent can the membership of each group be related to key socio-economic and ideological factors? Our study contributes to the field in at least two ways. First, to our knowledge, our study is the first to track the evolution of eco-social divides over time. Second, we also investigate the hitherto neglected role of cultural dimension of political ideology in shaping people’s eco-social preferences. We find that eco-social divides indeed exist in Great Britain as evidenced by the sizes of the four attitudinal groups, the membership of which is clearly structured by socio-demographic and ideational factors. However, these groups are not static, and the overall trend is clear – supporters of both welfare and environment measures are becoming more numerous while the group of eco-social policy sceptics that combines opposition to both measures is diminishing. Our findings also provide critical insights into the structure of eco-social attitudinal group membership and the relative importance of socio-economic and demographic factors vis-à-vis political party allegiance and the cultural dimension of political ideology. Particularly remarkable is the dominant role of libertarianism-authoritarianism scale, both in terms of the difference in the odds of authoritarians and libertarians being in various attitudinal groups, and the explanatory power of this factor. In practical terms, the decrease in the number of eco-social policy sceptics may indicate a favourable electoral climate for promoting eco-social agenda in the years to come. However, there are two important caveats here. First, support for the welfare dimension is markedly lower among the younger age groups and only time will tell if these age cohorts will change their minds once they grow older (and accordingly start to benefit more from the welfare state). Second, if the primary source of opposition to eco-social agenda is authoritarianism, the advocates have a more arduous task to accomplish as ideological dispositions are known to be less prone to change than political parties’ stances on particular issues.