Pro-environmental voting: What it is, how to measure it, and its determinants among contemporary European voters
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[1] Central European University
Central European University
Hungría
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- Localización: Parliamentary affairs: A journal of representative politics, ISSN 0031-2290, Vol. 78, Nº 1, 2025, págs. 77-96
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
With this research, I introduce the concept of pro-environmental voting, proposing an outcome-oriented rather than motivation-based definition and measurement. By conceptualizing it as an instance of pro-environmental behavior, I define it as voting for a party that takes a pro-environmental stance and for which environmental protection is also relatively salient—regardless of whether that is why the voter supports that party. I suggest measuring it by multiplying, for the party voted, its salience score on environmental protection with the distance between its position on the environment and the average position of all parties in the system on the same issue. Then, I apply this measurement to the recently released ESS10 (2023) data from 26 European countries. Findings primarily reveal that moral obligation and age are key drivers of pro-environmental voting; they also show that younger individuals vote more consistently with their environmental concern than older voters.
