Can Attitudes Predict Outcomes? Public Opinion, Democratic Institutions and Environmental Policy.

The "post-materialist" values hypothesis, positing heightened concern for the environment, should predict convergence in environmental policies. Yet variation persists, even when controlling for income levels. This puzzle deserves further scrutiny: is it attitudes, policies, or both that diverge? What, in the end, are the roles of public opinion and political institutions in determining outcomes in environmental policies? Greater understanding into the causal mechanisms linking attitudes to policy outcomes is required. This will be sought by building upon Congleton's (1992, 1996) median-voter model of environmental policy-making, whereby we develop an extension to include voter-information characteristics and test its effects by applying the model to outcomes for various air pollution issues. The results provide evidence for significant voter-information effects and suggest that two critical antecedent conditions are necessary for political-institutional and voter-information variables to have an effect: opportunity for redistribution over time (or across economic sectors), and the presence of a credible framework for addressing collective action problems. The most important implication of this analysis is that relying on democratic reform alone may not suffice to improve environmental policy outcomes if there is a failure to address underlying collective action problems. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]