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Corruption experiences in public services and prioritizing the environment in Latin America

ABSTRACT

Introduction:

What are the consequences of corruption experiences for public attitudes towards prioritizing the environment? Under corrupt governments protection of the environment is less likely because politicians and bureaucrats trade compliance for bribes, and citizens have less reason to trust that fellow citizens will contribute to protecting the environment. Therefore, corruption experiences reduce incentives for prioritizing the environment.

Materials and Methods:

The argument is tested by analyzing data from the 2016 survey of the Latin American Public Opinion Project for eighteen Latin American countries specifying ordinal logistic regression models and generalized structural equation models.

Results:

The results show that experiences of corruption reduce the probability of prioritizing the environment, and the mediation analysis suggests that the association between bribery and prioritizing the environment is mediated by a reduction in interpersonal trust.

Discussion:

Existing studies have focused on the consequences for environmental attitudes of corruption at the macro level. This work contributes to this research by exploring the policy feedback effects of corruption experiences on citizens environmental attitudes and broadens the knowledge of these attitudes in Latin America, a region less studied by the literature on the subject.

Keywords
corruption experiences; interpersonal trust; environment prioritization; structural equation models; Latin America

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