Download Why the environment might not be the textbook example of

Why the environment might not be the
textbook example of a valence issue
Alexia Katsanidou∗
Kostas Gemenis†
Paper prepared for the 2010 EPOP Conference,
University of Essex, 10–12 September 2010.
Abstract
It has been often argued that the issues relating to the environment
and its protection can be best characterised as valence issues. According to this argument, all political parties endorse the same position
and differ only on the degree in which they emphasise it. In this paper we challenge the conventional wisdom that parties approach the
environment from a valence issue perspective. To support our claim,
we triangulate among different bodies of empirical evidence: quantitative and qualitative analyses of party manifestos and political text, as
well as expert and mass survey data. Our findings suggest that there
are significant differences in the ways parties approach environmental issues and that, by taking into account these differences, we can
effectively distinguish the environmental from the anti-environmental
parties.
∗
GESIS, Cologne, Germany,e-mail: [email protected].
Department of Political Science and Research Methods, University of Twente, The
Netherlands, e-mail: [email protected].
†
1
1
Introduction
The term valence appeared in political science for the first time in Stokes’
seminal critique (Stokes 1963) of Downsian spatial framework (Downs 1957),
where he distinguished between ‘position’ and ‘valence’ issues. Position issues
were defined by Stokes as involving advocacy of government actions from a
set of alternatives. These alternatives structure a continuum that captures
the distribution of voter preferences on the issue (Stokes 1963, 373). This
continuum presents two extremes between which voters and parties can place
themselves and they can be encountered, as ‘for’ or ‘against’ positions on the
same question (Budge 2001, 83), or as tradeoffs between two highly desirable
but mutually exclusive outcomes. To contrast these position issues Stokes
developed the term ‘valence’ to define consensual issues those issues on which
there is agreement on the desired outcome for the whole electorate and one
clear ideological position for all political parties.
Despite being illustrated on the basis of consensus, valence issues can still
structure party competition but they do so in a different way than a positional
issues. Valence issues structure competition by associating political parties
to desired outcomes. In other words, as all citizens agree on ends, vote choice
is based on the means to achieve these desired ends. Valence-structured party
competition uses mainly performance, observed or anticipated to associate
possitive or negative outcomes to the parties. The theory behind valence
issues has been used to measure leader and party performance (Clarke et al.
2004, Groseclose 2001, Schofield 2004, Whiteley 1984) and in concepts such as
issue ownership and issue salience (Green 2007, Petrocik 1996). Furthermore,
the concept of valence issues has served as the basis of the so-called ‘salience
theory of party competition’ (Budge 2001, Robertson 1976).
Nevertheless, valence theory was severely criticised mainly because it did
not seem to provide a clear alternative to the spatial model. Despite the
differences on many areas such as lack of attention to ideological distance,
lack of ideological alternatives, focus on delivery, lower need for information
processing and lower allowance for political manipulation (Clarke et al. 2004,
44), the two theories also have a lot of similarities. Issues, in fact, have both
positional and valence aspects. Traditional spatial issues that divide the
public also need a valence component to demonstrate which party is capable
enough to deal with the issue, regardless of position. Similarly traditional
valence issues, such as economic prosperity have a positional edge related to
the path a party can take to achieve the commonly desired goal.
2
Therefore an issue can be framed one way or the other depending on the
context and issues can fluctuate between position and valence. Issues can
have a life cycle during which they can polarise public opinion and party
ideology or they can build a consensus around a commonly desired goal.
As a consequence, issues that attract high levels of consensus can be considered as valence issues. The literature that uses this concept always uses
specific examples to refer to valence issues. Traditionally economic prosperity/growth, national security and crime are treated as core valence issues
(Clarke et al. 2009, Green 2007). These issues have two important characteristics: public opinion on them is converged on one ideal point and subsequently party competition is structured around performance. To achieve
the commonly desired outcome the mentioned issues required very complex
policy making. Opinion convergence allows the voters to avoid stressing on
the details of these policies and to focus on performance when deciding which
party to vote for.
This cognitive sequence poses a problem in the use of the term ‘valence’.
Many scholars treat as valence issues those issues related to measuring of performance of leader and parties and forget about the first step of establishing
whether an issue inspires opinion consensus and thus can be legitimately pass
to the next level of cognition, performance. A typical example of valence issue that can fall in this category is the environment, which is used very often
as a textbook example of valence issues. We argue that this should not be
the case.
2
Why the environment might not be a valence issue
Concern for the environment entered the political agenda strongly in the late
1960s and early 1970s, being part of what has been labelled as ‘new politics’.
Since then it has been presented as a valence issue where everyone agrees on
the desired policy outcome: a clean environment. From early on while making
their contribution to the alignment-dealignment debate Flanagan & Dalton
(1984) argued that in Western Europe some of the ‘new issues’, namely environmental pollution, are actually valence issues. Other studies of West European politics (Carter 2006, Clarke et al. 2004, Rohrschneider 1988) as well
as American politics (Jacoby 1994) agree with this categorisation. Moreover,
3
Lester (1997, 107) showed that, even though there is no clear large active
pro-environment bloc, environmental protection has the large support of the
majority of the electorate turning it into a valence issue. Furthermore, Mertig & Dunlap (1995) concluded that environmental protection has reached
the valence status, as it elicits little public opposition and predicted that environmentalism would remain a vital component of Western political systems
for the foreseeable future. Rigorous quantitative studies have also used the
environment as a token valence issue in their measurements together with
unemployment, crime, refugees and health (van der Brug 2004). Also, in
the field of estimating parties’ policy positions, the environment is presented
as a valence issue as it has been argued that any differences between the
parties can be attribute only to the salience that parties attach to the issue
(Budge 2001).
The literature that treats the environment as a valence issue usually
presents empirical evidence in terms of public opinion polls but in many
cases the questions asked are censored in the sense that support for the
environment is not framed within given alternatives. Therefore there is a
hidden but crucial assumption often made. The assumption that there is an
agreement about the course of action with regards to environmental issues.
However, as environmental politics go, there are various ways in which we
can go about and protect the environment, some which are more costly than
others. Do people agree on road taxing or green taxes in general? How
about nuclear power? Should we assume that everybody agrees that it is
environmentally dangerous and should be abolished as soon as possible? By
thinking about the environment in these terms we can easily come to the
conclusion that even though there is an apparent agreement on the goal (a
clean environment) there seems to be no agreement about the specific course
of action. Party politics, nevertheless, are (also) about taking specific decisions in public policy and as Dalton (1996) argued, politics entail tradeoffs
between preferences and values. We cannot demand a clean environment
and support industrial growth, as we cannot demand lower taxes and an
increase in public spending at the same time.1 Doing so would be equivalent
to eating the cake and having it. As a consequence, the political discourse
on the environment has been analysed by juxtaposing it to economic growth
(see Dryzek 1997).
1
As a consequence, we often observe that there is no overwhelming agreement in public
opinion on issues such as the introduction of green taxes (see Inglehart 1995).
4
Following Dalton (1996) and Laver (2001b) we argue that it is more useful
to present environmental issues in confrontational terms in which citizens
and parties can make distinct choices. By doing so, we show that there is
no apparent consensus and that we can clearly differentiate between proenvironmental and anti-environmental parties. As a consequence, we argue
that the idea of treating the environment as a valence issue might not be very
useful in empirical research. The rest of the paper presents some empirical
evidence in support of our argument.
3
Empirical evidence
Our empirical evidence start from the World Values Surveys were respondents
were specifically asked to choose between environmental protection and economic growth. In constrast to the literature which uses aggregate values
across countries and parties as evidence of consensus (e.g. Robertson 1987),
we disaggregate the data according to party choice. As evident from Tables
1–3 which present the results for Germany, Norway and Spain, there is a nontrivial percentage of voters which prefer economic growth to environmental
protection. In Germany in particular, the voters of the biggest parties are
overwhelmingly in favour of economic growth, whereas in most cases there
are clear differences among the voters of different parties. In contrast, the
results for a majoritarian system such as Britain can be interpreted as an
indication of an existence of consensus among the voters (as shown in Table
4, in a similar type of question in the British Social Attitudes Survey). With
the exception of the Green Party, however, the overwhelming support is not
on the pro-environmental side as valence theory would predict, but rather on
the neutral position which most possibly reveals the usual problems of using
a Likert midpoint (see Johns 2005).
Secondly, we present a reanalysis of the Comparative Manifestos Project
(CMP) data which have often been used as evidence in support of valence
theory. As Laver (2001a) has argued, most of the coding categories in the
CMP are explicitly positional (‘positive’ versus ‘negative’) whereas the rest
are implicitly positional and censored, in the sense that there is no positive
equivalent for a negative category and vice versa. Environmental protection
(‘per501’) is such a category, since only positive references are coded by the
CMP. Several researchers, however, have argued that it would be more appropriate to subtract from category 501 the references to category 410 (‘per410’
5
Table 1: Germany: Attitudes towards the environment by party choice
First Choice
Party Vote
I would
not vote
I would
cast blank
Economic Growth Environment
66.67%
33.33%
58.21%
41.79%
NPD
47.06%
61.93%
60.26%
64.71%
19%
57.42%
81.26%
52.94%
38.07%
39.74%
35.29%
81%
42.58%
18.75%
N
807
588
other
Christian Democrats
Social Democrats
Free Democrats
The Greens
Left Democrats
6
Table 2: Norway: Attitudes towards the environment by party choice
First Choice
Party Vote
no right
not vote
Economic Growth Environment
22.73%
77.27%
52.94%
83.66%
61.59%
77.22%
90.91%
100%
Liberals
47.06%
16.34%
38.41%
22.78%
9.09%
0%
22.22% 77.78%
13.64% 86.36%
10.20% 89.80%
N
192
715
other
Labour Party
Progressive Party
Conservative Party
Christian Democratic
Communist Party
Centre Party
Socialist Left
7
Table 3: Spain: Attitudes towards the environment by party choice
First Choice
Party Vote
I would
not vote
I would
cast blank
Economic Growth Environment
32%
68%
41.94%
58.06%
Left Nationalists
14.29%
30.24%
47.64%
37.50%
56.76%
10.53%
85.71%
69.76%
52.36%
62.50%
43.24%
89.47%
N
321
579
other
PSOE
PP
Greens
Right Nationalists
8
Table 4: United Kingdom: Ticket price should reflect environmental damage
by party choice
Party ID
Agree
Neutral
Disagree
Conservatives
Green Party
48.25%
42.82%
44.14%
50%
20%
72.22%
29.39%
29.39%
35.14%
28.57%
60%
11.11%
22.37%
27.01%
20.72%
21.43%
20%
16.67%
N
329
220
175
Labour
Liberal Democrats
Scottish Nationalists
Plaid Cymru
productivity) which measures the percentage of emphasis to economic growth
(see Carter 2006, Lowe et al. 2010, Weale et al. 2000). Interestingly enough,
however, the correlation between the two measures (per501+per416 and
(per501+per416)-per410) for the whole CMP dataset excluding the ‘estimate’ observations which represents interpolated or copy/pasted data (progtype=3, see Benoit, Mikhaylov & Laver 2009, 501, fn. 10) and including only
manifestos published after May 1974 (edate>5258), is very high (Pearson’s
r = .942, p < .001 and N = 1980). This means that the positive references
to environmental protection in the manifestos actually capture the whole
confrontational and positional aspect of the conflict between environmental
protection and economic growth.
Thirdly, we present evidence from a confrontational (see Gemenis &
Dinas 2010, Pellikaan, van der Meer & de Lange 2003) coding of party manifestos. For this, we use the EU Profiler data on three relevant questions2
to create an index variable which indicates how environmental a party is
2
These are: Q16: Renewable sources of energy (e.g. solar or wind energy) should be
supported even if this means higher energy costs; Q17: The promotion of public transport
should be fostered through green taxes (e.g. road taxing); and Q18: Policies to fight global
warming should be encouraged even if it hampers economic growth or employment.
9
40
30
Frequency
20
10
0
−2
−1
0
1
Manifestos Confrontational Placement
2
Figure 1: Pro- and anti-environmental parties according to their manifestos.
based on its policy statements. The three 5-point items make up a reliable
scale both in terms of Cronbach’s α (.799) and in terms their monotone
homogeneity by using of lowess curves (see Appendix, and also Dinas &
Gemenis 2010, Gemenis & Dinas 2010). As evident from Figure 1, when we
assess party environmentalism in terms of specific policy statements which
have a confrontational phrasing, we can clearly distinguish pro-environmental
from anti-environmental parties. Moreover, in Figure 2, we show that the
confrontational estimates generally follow a similar pattern with estimates
from the Benoit & Laver (2006) expert survey, which like previous expert surveys (see Huber & Inglehart 1995, Laver & Hunt 1992) have asked experts
to differentiate between pro-environmental and anti-environmental parties
based on their position on environmental protection versus economic growth.
Finally, we consider evidence from the qualitative analysis of the 2010
UK party manifestos. Britain has been traditionally considered having a
party system where valence issues prevail (Budge & Farlie 1983, Clarke
10
20
Expert Survey Placement
5
10
15
FDP
VVD
PP
FF
ODS
UPR
LN
VB
DVU
VLD
Cons
SDKU
TP
DF
CSU
CDU
Rep
FPO
UUP
PSL
DUP
DPS
PNL
CiU
CDH
NDSV
ADR
FP
CDA
OVP
PSD(RO)
PO
PiS
PRM
Smer
SLS
SPO
CSV
SNP
LB
KOK
KF
MR
DP(LU)
V
FN
LDS
FG
LiCS
PN(MT)
DISY SMK−MKP
US−DU
Labour SNS SDP(FI)
MSZP
LSDP
UDC
SDS
NSi−KLS
BSP(KzB)
Kesk(FI)
SPD
CDV
SZDSZ
PS(BE)
Fidesz
KDU−CSL
KD
CSSD
SF
M
CDS−PP
PL(MT)
MPF
ND
LS−HZDS
JL
N−VA
KDH
PNV
SLD−UP
TB−LNNK
PCTVL
SNS
KKE
LSAP
MDF
PvdA
SF(NI)
SP(NL)
SDLP
AKEL
EDEK
Verts(LU)
PSD
DIKO
PCF(FG)
KD
SAP
KSCM
PASOK
DeSUS SNK
Tric/MA/PP/AC
SDE
SFP
UDMR
CU−SGP
PSOE
PS(PT)
SmS
SD
SPSp
VAS
It.Val.
D66
C
ZZS
PC
LibDems
RV
PCTP
AD(MT)
IU
SZ
SYRIZA
V(SE)
Grunen
ECO−PER
GRU
BE
GR
Verts(FR)
Green(FI)
Ecolo
Groen
MP
0
SF
GL
−2
−1
0
1
Manifestos Confrontational Placement
2
Figure 2: Expert survey and confrontational party placements on the environmental dimension (fit line with 95% CI).
11
et al. 2004, Clarke et al. 2009, Green 2007). When looking beyond the
campaign slogans where all parties try to present a pro-environmental image in abstract terms, into the more specific issues such as nuclear power,
green taxes and measures against global warming we find a divergence in
policy positions. On the one hand the Green Party emerges as the most
pro-environmental party whereas the BNP which considers global warming
to be a hoax and opposes green taxes and supports nuclear power emerges as
the most anti-environmental. UKIP is similarly anti-environmental, whereas
there are notable differences among the three major parties as well. In most
cases we do not observe an agreement among the parties with regards to
the course of action as valence theory implies and the differences among the
parties are not just differences of emphasis. Needless to say, anecdotal evidence from across Europe (Mair 2001) shows that proportional representation
could be conducive to the emergence of anti-environmental policy positions
as political parties, especially on the extreme right, could compete for the
anti-environmental niche among the electorate.
4
Conclusion
In the introduction to this paper we presented the argument that environmental issues can be best analysed in terms of valence theory which assumes
that voters and parties agree and whatever differences among them lie in
the importance and emphasis they place to the issue. In this paper, we
challenged this notion by arguing that politics entail choices and tradeoffs
between mutually exclusive goals and that looking at environmental issues
purely from the side of environmental protection is miselading. By operationalising environmental issues as tradeoffs between environmental protection and economic growth in line with the literature on environmental discourse and practice (Dryzek 1997, Weale et al. 2000), we showed that there
is no overall consensus among voters and parties and that we can clearly differentiate pro-environmental from anti-environmental parties. This picture
is consistent across different data sources including mass and expert surveys
and the quantitative and qualitative analysis of election manifestos. Quite
interestingly, the anti-environmental parties are usually to be found among
the radical (or extreme) right party family, an observation consistent with
the view of the emergence of the radical right as a ‘silent counter-revolution’
against the new politics brought by the green parties in the 1970s and early
12
1980s (see Ignazi 1992). We hope that this first empirical evidence will
stimulate a discussion regarding the use of environmental issues in terms of
valence issues theory and an interest in the study of the ‘politics of antienvironmentalism’ including the environmental discourse among the parties
of the radical right family.
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16
−.5
0
lowess issue16 rest1
.5
1
1.5
Appendix: examining the monotone homogeneity of three EU Profiler items.
−2
−1
0
rest1
1
2
Figure 3: Q16: Renewable sources of energy (e.g. solar or wind energy)
should be supported even if this means higher energy costs.
17
2
lowess issue17 rest2
0
1
−1
−2
−2
−1
0
rest2
1
2
Figure 4: Q17: The promotion of public transport should be fostered through
green taxes (e.g. road taxing).
18
2
lowess issue18 rest3
0
1
−1
−2
−2
−1
0
rest3
1
2
Figure 5: Q18: Policies to fight global warming should be encouraged even
if it hampers economic growth or employment.
19