Abstract
Existing research explains pro-environmental behavior as being motivated by personal values. In this article I extend this framework to examine not just the choice of whether to engage in pro-environmental behavior but also the choice between different pro-environmental behaviors. I argue that if several different pro-environmental behaviors all express the same personal values, and carry the same material costs, then individuals choose between them on the basis of their expected policy consequences. I report the results of a survey experiment showing that priming individuals to consider instrumental utility will cause over-reporting of some forms of environmental activism—those with the greatest expected policy impact. This prime will have no effect on over-reporting of other forms of activism. I conclude that instrumental utility is an important part of how individuals choose between types of pro-environmental political activism.
Introduction
In this article I argue that individuals use expected instrumental utility as a way to choose between different forms of pro-environmental behavior. Once they have made the decision to express environmental values through their behavior, they make a further choice. They choose between many pro-environmental behaviors, each of which has different expected instrumental effects due to the political context. I show that priming individuals to consider instrumental utility leads to over-reporting of the pro-environmental behaviors with the highest expected instrumental utility, namely, direct lifestyle changes. Conversely, priming individuals to consider personal values (expressive utility) leads to over-reporting of activism with low instrumental utility, namely, the activism related to environmental political parties, which tends to be ineffective in the U.S. context. Thus, instrumental utility seems to play an important role in the decision-making process, influencing individual choices between different forms of environmental activism. This survey experiment does not rely on respondents’ own assessments of their motivations, which may suffer from misreporting and social desirability bias, but instead uses an experimental manipulation to estimate whether instrumental utility is more or less associated with different pro-environmental political actions.
This extends existing theories of pro-environmental behavior (Steg, Bolderdijk, Keizer, & Perlaviciute, 2014; Steg & Vlek, 2009) and literature on political participation (Brennan & Lomasky, 1993; Downs, 1957; Riker & Ordeshook, 1968; Schuessler, 2000), both of which have, in large part, dealt with predicting whether individuals participate rather than how people participate, and so have focused on expressive rather than instrumental utility. 1 Much contemporary research on motivation for pro-environmental behavior is guided both by Ajzen’s (1991) theory of planned behavior (TPB) and Schwartz’s (1977) norm-activation theory (NAT). TPB argues that the best predictor of behavior is “behavioral intention,” itself determined by the perceived individual capacity for action, by relevant social norms, and by individual attitudes toward the behavior in question. NAT looks at different variables—personal awareness of the consequences of a behavior, and a sense of personal responsibility for those consequences—as important predictors of altruistic pro-environmental behavior. Wall, Devine-Wright, and Mill (2007) summarize both of these theories as being centered on norms and values, with TPB highlighting internal values and NAT emphasizing external norms and values. Both theories emphasize the utility of having participated and expressed certain values, rather than the instrumental consequences of the behavior. Similarly, in the majority of academic literature on political participation, expressive utility has taken center stage at the expense of instrumental utility. Riker and Ordeshook (1968) argued that the probability of individual participation affecting any political outcome was so low that activism could not be rationally justified on this basis. They instead claimed that expressive utility and material costs were the crucial moving parts explaining participation. Empirical survey work on patterns of participation in the United States (McNulty, Dowling, & Ariotti, 2009; Rosenstone & Hansen, 1993; Singh, 2011; Verba, Schlozman, & Brady, 1995) and elsewhere (Blais, 2000; Inglehart, 1977; Verba, Nie, & Kim, 1978), as well as field experimental work on encouraging participation (Gerber, Green, & Larimer, 2008; Green & Gerber, 2007; Panagopoulos, 2013), and formal models of participation (Gailmard, Feddersen, & Sandroni 2009; Olson, 1965), have tended to follow this focus on expressive rather than instrumental utility. Work that does deal with the instrumentality of participation often highlights electoral examples rather than participation more generally (Kedar, 2009; Rosenstone & Hansen, 1993; Singh, 2011; but also see Dekker & Halman, 2003, for work in non-electoral contexts).
However, in the contemporary environmental movement in the United States, several different participation options are available that all only require a small investment of time and all clearly express environmental values. Some people choose to participate in political parties, others in interest groups, and still others in ways that are outside the political system entirely. How then are individuals choosing between forms of participation that are similar on the dimensions of expressive values and material costs? I argue that the answer is rooted in previous work suggesting that some forms of participation are likely to be more instrumentally effective than others. In a two-party system operating under plurality electoral rules, environmental political parties are likely to have low instrumental utility (Cox, 1997). On the other hand, direct changes to individual lifestyles—such as recycling, taking public transport, and so on—have a clear instrumental impact (albeit small and incremental) even in this relatively closed institutional context (Gerring & Thacker, 2008). The key implication of this argument is that activists are engaging in instrumentally rational behavior. Activism is not only about civic duty, but it is also about making real change.
The rest of the article proceeds as follows: first, I review existing work on the separation between expressive and instrumental utility, particularly in the context of political participation. Second, I discuss why instrumental utility varies between types of participation, and argue that instrumental utility explains the variation in forms of environmental activism. Third, I report the results of a survey experiment confirming the theoretical expectations outlined in the first and second sections. Finally, I discuss conclusions and extensions.
Expressive Utility, Instrumental Utility, and Rational Political Participation
The expressive utility of participation is the sum of the psychological costs and benefits of participating in some action. This sum accrues to an individual regardless of whether that action goes on to have tangible political consequences. For example, Brennan and Lomasky (1993) argue that in the case of voting, expressive utility comes from a sense of having done one’s duty in turning out to vote, and also from having made the right choice in voting for a candidate who symbolizes some component of the voter’s identity that the voter wishes to express (Green, Palmquist, & Schickler, 2003). Crucially, these psychological benefits accrue to the voter regardless of who wins the election (Riker & Ordeshook, 1968). Instrumental utility refers to the utility of the intended outcomes of a political action (Brennan & Lomasky, 1993; Schuessler, 2000). It only accrues to participants if the intended outcome actually occurs. To continue with the example of voting, instrumental utility can be thought of as the utility that only accrues to a voter if they actually affect the outcome, that is, if the election is determined by a single vote. If this were to occur, the instrumental utility of voting would be the utility difference between the less-preferred candidate winning and the more-preferred candidate winning. However, even for voters with strong preferences, expected instrumental utility is clearly very low because one vote is almost certain not to change the outcome in any particular election. 2 Given the non-trivial material costs of voting, in time and energy, instrumental utility alone is unlikely to make voting worthwhile. This framework has been generalized to all forms of participation including environmental activism (Boatright, 2004; Claggett & Pollock, 2006; Dalton, 2007; Downs, 1957; Frohlich, Oppenheimer, & Young, 1971; Olson, 1965; Platt, 2008; Schuessler, 2000; Verba et al., 1995).
There is also a comprehensive body of research in social psychology operationalizing the concept of expressive utility as it relates to environmental activism (Ajzen, 1991; Feather, 1995; Schwartz, 1977). Pro-environmental behavior expresses values that are highly abstract and that can be central to self-identity (Schwartz, 1977; Steg et al., 2014). Feather (1995) showed that the expected utility of different alternatives was related to their association with particular values, and that these differences in expected utility guided behavior. Many studies have adapted this framework for the environmental arena. For example, Van der Werff, Steg, and Keizer (2013) argue that biospheric values are crucial for establishing a strong environmental identity. In a survey in the Netherlands, they find that these values and identities can be separated, and are both correlated with pro-environmental behavior. De Groot and Steg (2008) are also able to differentiate the effects of both biospheric and altruistic values on pro-environmental behavior. Similarly, Bamberg and Schmidt (2003) separate the internal values emphasized by Ajzen (1991) and the social values highlighted by Schwartz (1977) and find that the variables suggested by the former model are more predictive of environmentally friendly car use behavior, in a survey of several hundred students in the United Kingdom. Steg et al. (2014) argue that biospheric values are particularly important because situational factors can activate them and therefore produce lasting behavioral changes. They argue that although reducing material costs is important, it has the side-effect of legitimating concerns about costs, and thus lowering the relative salience of normative goals.
Two points in particular from this body of work guide the present study. First, some work has extended these theories to look at specifically political forms of pro-environmental behavior. Second, in several papers, a potential role for instrumental utility is examined. In terms of political activism, Verplanken and Holland (2002) report one study on hypothetical political donations and on voting behavior, and find again that biospheric and altruistic values are important predictors of intending to act pro-environmentally. However, their study can be extended in important ways, as it is not a nationally representative sample, they do not ask about actual donations (though they do assess external validity on the voting question), and social desireability bias is likely to be significant, given that the question on hypothetical donations occurs in the midst of a questionnaire on pro-environmental behavior specifically.
In terms of instrumental utility, Kashima, Paladino, and Margetts (2014) argue that a sense of “environmental striving” for actual environmental improvements remains an important predictor of behavior even after accounting for environmental self-identity. Similarly, Wan, Shen, and Yu (2014) argue that the potential effectiveness of different recycling regimes impacts individual decisions to recycle. I build on the work above to argue that instrumental utility breaks the tie between forms of political participation that are equal in terms of expressive utility and material costs.
For example, if supporting a political party is likely to have almost no impact, but making lifestyle changes is likely to have at least some incremental impact, then activists will rationally choose the latter option even if the former option offers just as much expressive utility. The difference in instrumental utility can be substantial enough to make this choice worth the cognitive effort (Lupia & McCubbins, 1998). Crucially though, even when the difference in instrumental utility is not large, Rosenstone and Hansen (1993; Frohlich et al., 1971; Olson, 1965; Salisbury, 1969) argue that optimizing over even small differences in instrumental utility is vital for at least some actors: the leaders of interest groups/parties, whose careers often depend on being instrumentally successful. Rosenstone and Hansen (1993) pay particular attention to how this works in the U.S. context: Interest group entrepreneurs will time their campaigns to coincide with electoral cycles, when they can gain most leverage over politicians and thus have the greatest instrumental impact. There are other examples of political participation being instrumentally rational. Olson (1965) argues that some individuals, if they derive enough individual benefit from the provision of a public good, will rationally pay almost the entire cost of provision themselves. 3 He describes the groups that contain such individuals as “privileged groups,” because the presence of these singular individuals makes collective action to provide a public good much more likely. Frohlich et al. (1971) highlight that political entrepreneurs can play a similar role, paying the logistical costs of organizing for provision of a public good, because if the public good is successfully provided, it will have an instrumental payoff for them in the form of a sustainable career at the head of a political organization. These entrepreneurs will thus pay attention to the issues and tactics that are most likely to lead to successful provision of some public good. For potential activists then, entrepreneurial activity is a signal about which political organizations or lifestyle changes are most instrumentally effective. 4 This makes the behavioral choice even less cognitively costly.
Pro-environmental political activism can be divided into three categories: interest group activity, political party activity, and pro-environmental lifestyle changes. Political parties attempt to influence government policy by capturing government positions in elections. By getting candidates from their organization elected, they are in a position to influence policy outcomes (Downs, 1957). Interest groups attempt to influence government decisions so as to benefit their constituency, not by capturing government positions but instead by pressuring those who already occupy those positions (Grossman & Helpman, 2001; Salisbury, 1969). Different interest groups may exert this pressure in very different ways, but even an “outsider” protest against some state policy is successful only if it influences state policy (Dalton, Reccia, & Rohrschneider, 2003; Farrer, 2014; McAdam, McCarthy, & Zald, 1996; Tarrow, 1989). Groups that engage predominantly in actions aimed at influencing state policy are then defined as interest groups. Lifestyle changes, then, are a category of political activities that have a positive effect—however minor—on environmental conditions without requiring government actors to do anything differently. All three types of action can change policy in a pro-environmental direction. For example, one could work toward energy efficiency by getting elected and legislating in favor of renewable energy, or one could lobby existing legislators to do the same, or one could simply switch to low-energy light bulbs.
These forms of pro-environmental behavior carry similar expressive utility in part because environmentalist political organizations are niche organizations. Niche organizations are those which focus on one single issue above all others, and which do so on an issue that is largely neglected by all other political organizations (Ezrow, 2010; Meguid, 2008; Schlesinger, 1984; Wagner, 2012). Mainstream political organizations, on the other hand, emphasize a wider variety of issues. For example, the mainstream parties each have a set of issue areas that they “own,” and so participation gives individuals a different amount of expressive utility depending on the set of values embodied by their chosen action (Adams, Merill, & Grofman, 2005; Budge & Farlie, 1983; Egan, 2013). Brennan and Lomasky (1993) argue that voting for one mainstream candidate or another will allow citizens to express their identities as “charitable,” “patriotic,” or even “pro-life,” “pro-choice,” and so on (Boatright, 2004; Brennan & Lomasky, 1993; Green et al., 2003; Schuessler, 2000). Mainstream political organizations compete on a set of dimensions, but niche organizations focus on a single dimension of politics and so embody only one value. Therefore activists motivated by environmentalism are unlikely to be able to use expressive utility to distinguish between types of participation that are all connected primarily to environmentalism (Brennan & Lomasky, 1993; Schuessler, 2000). Volunteering for what an individual perceives as a pro-environmental party, or pro-environmental interest group, or making non-trivial lifestyle changes in a pro-environmental direction, are all equally rooted in expressing environmental values. In contrast, expressing one’s identity as a “Democrat” can essentially only be done by actions that affirm a commitment to that political organization (Green et al., 2003). Even volunteering for a liberal interest group that works closely with the Democrats does not carry comparable expressive connotations (Brennan & Lomasky, 1993). Volunteering for a Democratic candidate is therefore a very different act, in expressive term, than volunteering for an interest group. For environmentalists and other niche activists, these acts are far more similar. 5
However, these types of participation do vary instrumentally. Political party participation is likely to be strikingly ineffective in instrumental terms. The majoritarian electoral system in the United States restricts the potential of new parties to signal an electoral threat to existing parties unless they have extremely high potential for public support, and so participation in existing or new political parties is unlikely to bring rewards to small groups of environmental activists (Adams et al., 2005; Budge & Farlie, 1983; Ezrow, 2010; Farrer, 2014; Meguid, 2008). Lifestyle changes, on the other hand, are immediately and almost “unconditionally” effective. These individual acts have a small but measurable effect, and therefore more likely to be associated with instrumental utility than are the less tangible and often unsuccessful campaigns waged by interest groups and parties. The contrast is particularly strong between these individual changes and the option of participating in a political party, as the Green Party in the United States—despite many local successes—has at this point won no federal office and both major parties have continued to focus on the economy rather than the environment (Downs, 1957; Meguid, 2008). This variation in instrumental utility is important for potential activists’ decision-making processes.
I use a priming experiment to test whether different forms of participation are really associated with different levels of instrumental utility. Primes should influence how respondents are affected by social desirability bias when answering questions about their participation. I hypothesize that priming individuals to consider instrumental utility will lead to over-reporting of lifestyle activism, as this has the highest instrumental utility. I also hypothesize that priming individuals to consider expressive utility will lead to over-reporting of party activism, as this has the lowest instrumental utility. These hypotheses are stated more formally below.
Methods
In fall 2010, as part of the Co-Operative Congressional Election Study (CCES), I asked a nationally representative random sample of 1,000 adult U.S. citizens about their pro-environmental political behaviors, in an online survey. Respondents were recruited using probability sampling, and those who did not have internet access were offered such access (as detailed in the Knowledge Networks study description at www.electionstudies.org). Once enrolled in the larger CCES, respondents were also randomly placed into either a control group or one of two treatment groups. The control group was simply asked about their activism. The two treatment groups were asked the same questions, but immediately prior to this, the first treatment group was given a prime about instrumental utility, and the second treatment group was given a prime about expressive utility. These primes are a way of assessing whether instrumental utility is more associated with particular forms of pro-environmental behavior in the United States, without relying on potentially unreliable self-reports of motivation.
The specific wording of the primes and the activism questions are as follows: “Given that a democratic government only responds to citizens when they make their voices heard, we now ask about three different types of citizen action that can prompt government to take action” (Instrumental Prime). “Given that political participation has been argued to be socially and personally fulfilling, we now ask about three different types of citizen action that can express political values” (Expressive Prime). The instrumental prime is written to make policy influence considerations more salient. It implies that the goal of activism should be to influence policy and increase the policy responsiveness of a government, and asks respondents to answer the follow-up questions by recalling any of their own activities which were directed at this goal. The considerations raised by this prime are likely to vary somewhat by respondents depending on their own experiences of their political context, but in general political institutions should decrease the instrumental utility of non-mainstream electoral campaigns in the United States. This institutional effect, however, is not explicitly given to respondents in the question wording, making for a harder test of this hypothesis. The expressive prime is broadly worded and refers to personal and social fulfillment, so as to include the whole variety of ways that expressing one’s values can bring psychological benefits. In existing literature on political participation, these benefits have been conceived in a variety of different ways, both social and personal. Therefore wording the prompt to refer only to the psychological benefits of fulfilling one’s civic duty (Riker & Ordeshook 1968) or of avoiding the social shame of not participating (Gerber et al., 2008), or referring to the personal pride of being associated with a particular campaign (Brennan & Lomasky, 1993; Dekker & Halman, 2003; Schuessler, 2000), or even mentioning more tangible selective benefits (Frohlich et al., 1971; Olson, 1965), might not capture the full range of ways that respondents might consider participation to be psychologically rewarding outside of its effects on policy. It is important that respondents were not biased toward one conception of how “expressive benefits” manifest themselves, when as highlighted above, a variety of conceptions are seen as plausible in the literature. 6 The drawback of this broad question wording is that it creates a somewhat weaker prime, and because the prime is connected to “participation,” it is perhaps more associated with voting than with interest group advocacy or direct lifestyle changes. However, the broader wording places the emphasis squarely on the benefits of participation that are guaranteed regardless of the success of the action, and it plausibly primes a much wider spectrum of respondents to consider expressive benefits. After receiving these prompts, each of the respondents was asked three questions about their participation. 7 “Did your views on the environment lead you to volunteer for, or contribute to, any political candidates this year?” (Political Party Participation). “Did your views on the environment lead you to volunteer for, or contribute to, any interest groups this year?” (Interest Group Participation). “Did your views on the environment lead you to make any significant lifestyle changes this year, including energy use, travel plans, and product purchase choices, either at home or at your place of work?” (Lifestyle Participation).
The primes serve primarily to heighten social desirability bias (Hanmer, Banks, & White, 2014; Holbrook & Krosnick, 2010). That is, they will increase over-reporting of whatever forms of participation are most associated with the prime. Chong and Druckman (2007) define primes as any prompt that causes a particular consideration associated with a given issue to become salient for a respondent, whereas a frame is defined as any prompt that changes the mix of considerations associated with a given issue. It is possible that some respondents interpret these treatments broadly enough to render them more aptly described as frames rather than primes, but the focus of each treatment is on a single consideration: expressive utility or instrumental utility. The rest of this section introduces the data.
Before showing the results, Table 1 shows some descriptive statistics of interest in this data set, including the three primes, and the three dependent variables, and then subsidiary independent variables that can be used to enhance the precision of the experimental estimates (Gerber & Green, 2012). No variables are available regarding post-materialism, a concept which is often strongly correlated with environmental activism (Dalton, 2007; Inglehart, 1977; Steg et al., 2014; Steg & Vlek, 2009), but income and education are strongly correlated with post-materialism, and the experimental methodology also means that the results will be unbiased even without accounting for post-materialism. Table 1 contains information on the included variables. The first independent variable comes from two questions on environmental spending, first “Should federal spending on protecting the environment be increased, decreased, or kept about the same?” and a follow-up: “Should it be [increased/decreased] a great deal, a moderate amount, or a little?” Answers to these two questions are coded as a 7-point scale from “decreased a great deal” to “increased a great deal.” The second independent variable is coded by asking respondents, “From what you know about global climate change or global warming, which one of the following statements comes closest to your opinion?” Respondents select one of five possible responses: “Global climate change is not occurring; this is not a real issue,” “Concern about climate change is exaggerated. No action is necessary,” “We don’t know enough about global climate change, and more research is necessary before taking any actions,” “There is enough evidence that climate change is taking place and some action should be taken,” or “Global climate change has been established as a serious problem, and immediate action is necessary.” These are coded as a 5-point scale of increasing certainty that climate change is serious and is occurring. A third independent variable asks about political interest: Some people seem to follow what’s going on in government and public affairs most of the time, whether there’s an election going on or not. Others aren’t that interested. Would you say you follow what’s going on in government and public affairs . . . ?
Unweighted Descriptive Statistics.
Respondents can answer “most of the time,” “some of the time,” “only now and then,” “hardly at all,” or “don’t know.” This variable is coded as a 4-point scale of increasing interest. Another variable codes the education of the respondent with 6 different categories of education, ranging from “did not graduate from high school” to “post-graduate degree.” The data also include the age of the respondent in years, the sex of the respondent with female as the base category of 0 and male as 1, the income of the respondent with 14 different categories of income ranging from “less than $10,000” to “$150,000 or more,” and the ethnicity of the respondent, although unfortunately the sample size only allows a coding of people of color as the base category of 0 and White respondents as 1. More details on question wording can be found in the CCES 2010 codebook.
Table 1 illustrates the face validity of the representativeness of the sample, and shows the opinions of the sample toward environmental issues in general through two survey questions: one on environmental spending and the other on climate change science. The variation in these responses suggests the importance of using these survey responses to control for environmental predispositions (Kashima et al., 2014). Table 1 also demonstrates that approximately one third of the sample is in each treatment/control group, as expected given the randomization procedure.
Results
In subsequent analyses, survey weights are included. Moving to the analysis, Table 2 reports the results of ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions of each dependent variable on dichotomous indicators for the two primes. The dependent variable is dichotomous, so a Probit or Logit specification would be the appropriate estimator for non-experimental data, but in an experimental context OLS simply gives the difference of means between the treatment and control groups, and so is still appropriate even when covariate adjustment is introduced (Angrist & Pischke, 2009; Lin, 2013). The intercept therefore shows the proportion of respondents answering “yes” to each question in the control group. So, around 41.6% of respondents made pro-environmental lifestyle changes, 10.5% engaged in interest group activity, and 10.9% in party activity. There is strong evidence to support H1 and H2, as a statistically significant 10.6% more respondents claimed to have made lifestyle changes if they were given the instrumental prompt, and 6.7% more respondents claimed to have engaged in party activity if given the expressive prompt.
Survey-Weighted OLS Estimates of the Treatment Effect.
Note. Standard errors in parentheses.
The statistical significance of these effects is further reinforced in an online appendix (at http://eab.sagepub.com/supplemental). I conduct randomization analysis on these results, assuming the sharp null hypothesis of no effect for any respondent and then calculating 10,000 treatment effects that might occur by random chance even under this sharp null hypothesis (Gerber & Green, 2012). 8 If the primes had no effect, we would expect our observed result to fall close to the center of this distribution. The observed effects described in H1 falls outside the 90 percentile range for the respective distributions. This constitutes strong evidence for H1. H2 falls just within these intervals in the associated distribution, suggesting more uncertainty about this effect.
Table 3 shows OLS results for the treatment effects when we use other relevant survey questions as covariates. Table 3 has the same substantive interpretation as Table 2—even when we control for the environmental opinions and demographics of each respondent, we obtain similar treatment effects: 12.9% more respondents mention lifestyle changes if they are primed to over-report instrumentally effective participation, and 4.4% more respondents mention party activity if they are primed to report expressively effective participation—although this latter effect is no longer statistically significant. Several other variables are statistically significantly correlated with different forms of activism in this regression. Notably, preference for environmental spending, a belief in anthropogenic climate change, and high political interest are all correlated with each of the three forms of activism. Political interest is particularly highly correlated with interest group activism, and lifestyle activism is strongly predicted by belief in climate science and preferences for high environmental spending. This suggests that some other individual-level characteristics might be important for how individuals choose between forms of activism. However, it is important to acknowledge that this is what Gerber and Green (2012) describe as an “agnostic” regression. That is, the specification is chosen to include variables that might help explain heterogeneity of treatment effects rather than to allow the best “ceteris paribus” interpretation of the added independent variables. So although some of these independent variables are statistically significant, and these correlations are intuitively plausible and hint at interesting phenomena, they cannot be given the same causal interpretation as can the experimentally manipulated prompts. 9 Therefore, the most important conclusions to draw from Table 3 are related to the experimental variables: Table 3 contains an important result because it demonstrates the robustness of the argument even when we control for that factors that help define an individual as an environmental activist, rather than simply looking at the aggregate effects across the nationally representative sample.
Survey-Weighted Results With Covariates.
Note. Standard errors in parentheses.
The results above therefore suggest that many different forms of political activism carry comparable levels of expressive utility, and are not discernibly different in terms of their material costs. This makes instrumental utility an important component of how individuals choose between them, even though instrumental utility comprises a relatively low proportion of the overall utility bundle.
Discussion
Not only is environmentalism a niche issue, and therefore an issue where multiple forms of participation carry similar expressive utility and similar material costs, but the tension between different forms of participation is particularly salient for environmental activists. The environmental movement is made up of many different groups and campaigns, with Green Party presidential candidates, grassroots demonstrators, and organic business entrepreneurs all claiming to be motivated by the same issue. However, these groups coexist uneasily, as they each must draw upon at least some of the same resources in terms of the time, money, and energy of potential environmental activists. This rivalry in activist recruitment has led to some heated confrontations in print (Monbiot & Porritt, 2000), as well as long-lasting political rivalries (Bess, 2003), and a continuing debate over the best use of environmentalist resources. Explaining the motivations behind why individuals choose different forms of environmental activism is vital for understanding this growing and increasingly salient global movement, as well as for understanding the actions of other niche activists in similar situations. These three types of activities all clearly signal one’s identity as an environmentalist. But each of them costs some resources: an investment of time and energy, and perhaps a small financial commitment. There is no obvious “best” option, either on the dimension of expressive utility or on the dimension of material costs. That is, the rate of “expressive utility” return on “material costs” paid is not systematically different across these three forms of participation.
This article has demonstrated that instrumental utility seems to be a significant part of the calculation that environmental activists make in the contemporary United States. Given the electoral system, if respondents are primed to consider expressive utility, they will over-report the type of activism for which expressive utility is almost the only motivating factor—political party activism which carries low expected instrumental rewards. However, this effect was not statistically robust under some specifications. More robust was the finding that instrumental utility is strongly associated with lifestyle factors, which implies that the future of the environmental movement in the United States may lie outside conventional political participation, and that instrumental appeals could be a useful recruitment tool. The findings here are also important from the perspective of political entrepreneurs in the environmental movement. When attempting to recruit activists, it is important to not only emphasize a commitment to pro-environmental values but also to highlight how their activism is instrumentally effective. Whether this consists of an interest group pointing to legislative lobbying successes or political candidates making a competitive showing in local elections, credible evidence of instrumental success is important for attracting recruits to one environmental group over another.
How dependent are these findings on the U.S. context? In other countries with more permissive electoral systems, it is likely that individuals who engage with election campaigns are more likely to see an instrumental payoff, because more explicitly environmental parties would have a more realistic chance of influencing policy (Farrer, 2014). Similarly, in countries with less permissive lobbying systems, it would be less likely that individuals would gain instrumental utility from activism that is channeled through an interest group. The analysis here also suggests that future research should explore further the trade-offs between different forms of pro-environmental political behaviors and the reasons for such trade-offs.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Peter Aronow, Alex Coppock, Pat Egan, Don Green, Michael Schwarm-Baird, and Alex Theodoridis for assistance at various stages, and Rodrigue Fordham for assistance and inspiration.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant SES-1023231 awarded to Arthur Lupia, Sean Gailmard, Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Scott de Marchi, and Brandice Canes-Wrone.
Notes
Author Biography
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
