Who is ready to pay for protecting the environment? Social and spatial divides in Europe

This study aims to identify opposition to environment policies through the lens of social and spatial stratification. We test for structural differences in willingness to pay higher taxes or prices to protect the environment across groups defined by education, social class, household income and the type of place where people live. We analyze individual-level data from the International Social Survey Program 2020 and the European Social Survey 2016 in 13 European countries. Results reveal significant and consistent disparities across datasets: individuals in the 1st income quintile are 13% points more likely to oppose higher taxes compared to the ones in the 5th quintile. And rural citizens are 9% points more likely to oppose such policies compared to the ones living in big cities, though large heterogeneity emerges across countries. Moreover, we find that these disparities are only weakly mediated by environmental concern or belief in climate change. This suggests living conditions may constrain the willingness to pay, even among environmentally concerned individuals. Finally, the intersection of social and spatial stratification highlights the complementarity of these two dimensions: the most willing to pay are upper-middle-class residents of urban areas, rather than upper-middle-class residents of peripheral regions.