An Analysis of the Effect of Natural Disasters on Environmental Opinion, 1992-2012

Abstract

“During the late sixties, Erskine declared the ‘unprecedented speed and urgency with which ecological issues have burst into the American consciousness’ to be a ‘miracle of public opinion’ (1978).[1] Over the past 50 years, our environment and the opinion of the public regarding environmental policies and issues has been drastically changing. This paper studies the effect of natural disasters on environmental public pinion at the state level by examining the trends of public opinion and its different driving variables. For our project, we are using data from the study “Environmental Public Opinion in U.S. States, 1973-2012”, Forthcoming, Environmental Politics by Sung Eun Kim and Johannes Urpelainen. This study evaluates state level polarization of environmental public opinion over time, while mainly looking at public opinion in the context of partisan polarization and its different trends since 1973. To systematically compare changes in state-level environmental public opinion after the occurrence of a natural disaster, we utilize the difference-in-difference technique using GSS, NOAA and census data. We provide a credible estimate for the change in state-level environmental public opinion after the occurrence of a natural disaster. While the original study uses multivariate regression with post-stratification, our study constructs a difference-in-difference model with the data created by the authors’ MRP techniques. We found that the state’s negative environmental opinion increased after the occurrence of a natural disaster within that state. This result contradicts our original hypothesis that a state’s positive environmental opinion would increase the year following a natural disaster. This means that there must be other variables affecting environmental public opinion. 

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