Using the Campbell Paradigm to Understand the Role of Institutional Trust in Environmental Policy Support 

Public support strongly impacts social change. This has been shown by Elinor Ostrom, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. At the same time, one of the key factors in the sustainable transformation of societies is the people’s action.

Previous research has proven that the lack of popular backing can hinder the adoption of sustainable policies, but even when a policy is accepted, it may prove ineffective. These issues can severely undermine sustainable progress and trigger backward movements that threaten to reverse all such development. Thus, stressing the importance of building support for sustainable policies may become one of the top priorities in climate change discourse.  

In our new preprint – Using the Campbell Paradigm to Understand the Role of Institutional Trust in Environmental Policy Support (Jan Urban & Ewa Duda) – we seek to understand how trust affects pro-environmental behavior. We focus on institutional trust because it has been proven to have a positive association with environmental policy support; however, previous research is inconsistent on this issue, missing data in certain contexts. Our analysis attempts to fill this gap using a framework that is rather new in the social sciences, namely Campbell’s paradigm. The study covers 28 European and non-European countries, with data coming from the 2023 survey of The International Social Survey Program (ISSP). 

Our results brought another perspective on the role of trust in building support for pro-environmental policies. According to the findings, trust in institutions aims to increase support for both pro- and anti-environmental policies. In such a case, the nature of the proposed policy matters little. Measuring the average level of institutional trust (including trust in scientists, university research centers, and the government) therefore cannot predict the nature of the policies that will be backed. These insights can be significant in designing effective incentives for sustainable transformation. 

More detailed information on the analysis and results can be found in the preprint here: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/srp6h