Is Political Trust Associated with Environment-Over-Economy Prioritization? A Comparison of Key Country-Level Factors

Political trust has been considered important for the popularity of environmental protection in previous research and this relationship has been widely studied, with researchers examining, for instance, the link between political trust and different environmental protection measures and policy instruments, as well as how political trust influences environmental attitudes over time. However, there is a significant research gap in the existing literature—the impact of the national context on the relationship between political trust and the prioritization of the environment has received less attention, with research largely concentrated on affluent Western countries, which often share relatively high economic and low corruption levels. Therefore, some scholars have highlighted the contextual issues: should political trust enhance support for environmental policies, even in countries where political institutions are widely seen as corrupt and environmental policies are relatively more burdensome? In our article, we explore how the country context influences the relationship between political trust and the prioritization of environmental protection over economic growth. We particularly focus on two country-level factors—perceived corruption and national affluence—as well as their interaction. We use data from the World Value Survey Wave 7 (2018–2022), comprising 94,278 respondents from 64 countries and regions, to analyze individual-level and country-level predictors and their interactions. Our findings from multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression models indicate that individual-level political trust enhances the prioritization of environmental protection only in countries characterized by high affluence and low perceived corruption. Conversely, political trust may have the opposite impact on this prioritization in countries with high perceived corruption. The results underscore the importance of contextual factors in evaluating the predictors of prioritizing environmental protection over economic growth.