Abstract
Cohort replacement is one widely implicated, but seldom studied, mechanism of long-term change in public opinion toward environmental protection. A key difficulty in extant research has been empirically distinguishing cohort effects from those of age. Applying recent methodological advances in age–period–cohort models, we examine the disaggregated effects of age, time period, and birth cohort on changes in Americans’ support of federal spending for environmental protection between 1973 and 2016. Results suggest that cohort replacement provides little explanatory power. Instead, we find large age effects, with the young more likely to be pro-environmental in their views, and substantial changes across time periods (but not steady rising support). These results suggest that there is no inexorable march toward greater environmentalism as younger cohorts with greater environmental awareness replace older ones, and highlight the relative lack of explicit theorizing about the relationship between age and the environment.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
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.
