Year: 2017
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: I propose the psychological proximity hypothesis to shed additional light on ourunderstanding of the motivation behind political participation. When people directlyexperience a political issue, that is, when the political issue is psychologically proximate, they are more likely to become involved. There are two mechanisms containedwithin this hypothesis. First, psychological proximity leads to higher levels of issuepublic membership, which in turn leads to activism. Second, because psychologicalproximity often leads to thinking of the issue in concrete terms, people are betterable to match specific political activities to address the problem. I develop the psychological proximity hypothesis in relation to issue-based activism across a variety ofpolitical domains in chapter two by using a combination of representative survey datafrom the American National Election Studies and the General Social Survey alongwith original data and a survey-experiment collected through Mechanical Turk. Inchapter 4, I apply the hypothesis to the environment and climate change in order toexamine the mechanisms more closely. In both chapters, the two mechanisms linkingproximity to activism are empirically supported.In addition to the psychological proximity hypothesis, in this dissertation I presenta novel measure of environmental attitudes that does not suffer from a confoundwith liberal ideology as existing scales do. The Moral Environmentalism Scale isconstructed by incorporating a mix of liberal and conservative moral language. The viiMES is the only scale analyzed that is able to predict Republican environmentalbehavior. Furthermore, the MES is psychometrically valid. All items load on a singlefactor, the scale detects low and high levels of moral environmentalism, and the MESdiscriminates between someone who is at the low end of the scale from someone whois very pro-environment.
Author: Aaron C. Sparks
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2953273697