Behavioral Dispositions Towards the Prevention of Pollution in Romania

Abstract

This article examines several aspects related to Romanian citizens' dispositions to financially contribute to the prevention of pollution. The data used are provided by the European Values Survey (EVS) 1999 and the EVS/Public Opinion Barometer (BOP) 2005. Both EVS waves used three specific questions, which investigated the extent to which persons would be willing to: 1. give up a part of their income, 2. accept a tax increase if this could contribute to the prevention of pollution, and 3. claim that the issue of pollution should be solved by the government, without individual financial contributions. These are the dependent variables of the analysis. Based on the epistemology of environmental citizenship literature, the dependent variables were dichotomized: the first two sentences are a semantic cover for the disposition towards active involvement, and the last sentence corresponds to the disposition towards passivity. In relation to these dependent variables, the effect of several independent variables (social-cultural, axiological, political-ideological, etc.) was analyzed and, in the end, two different citizenship profiles, specific to the two dispositions studied, were outlined.

Keywords

• behavioral dispositions
• pollution
• sociological profile