Exploring the Relationship Between Social Capital and Individuals' Policy Preferences for Environmental Protection: A Multinomial Logistic Regression Analysis

摘要

This paper presents an analysis of citizens' policy preferences for encouraging pro-environmental behaviour and the influence of social capital. Utilizing a multinomial logistic regression model, this paper aims to answer the following questions relating to citizen involvement in protecting the environment: (1) Do citizens prefer a policy that provides financial rewards for individuals who protect the environment to those that penalize individuals who damage the environment? (2) Do they prefer a policy that focuses on increasing environmental awareness through education to those that penalize individuals who damage the environment? (3) To what extent do individuals prefer punishment as a mechanism to control their behaviour? After controlling for individual characteristics, results showed that people with strong trust for fellow citizens and their government, prefer tax rewards and education to punishment mechanisms to promote pro-environmental behaviour. Results also showed that individuals are more likely to prefer penalty systems when compliance with social norms is motivated by perceptions of a shared burden of financial obligations on the citizenry. Furthermore, the results showed that civic participations generally did not have a statistically significant impact on citizens' policy choices. Implications of the research findings and future research directions are discussed.