This article establishes empirically that a persistent culture of \'rugged individualism\', captured by exposure to the American westward-moving frontier from 1790 to 1890, undermines pro-climate perceptions, environmental performance, and climate change preparedness across counties in the United States. It also demonstrates that individualism is associated with environmental underperformance at the state level, making it more difficult to mitigate the far-reaching consequences of changing climate conditions.Vu, Trung. (2024). Individualism and collective responses to climate change. Land Economics. 100. 398-419. 10.3368/le.100.2.121422-0103R1.
14 Following Bauernschuster, Falck, and Woessmann (2014), Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales (2004), and Putnam (1993, 2001), I use a county-specific measure of voting turnout averaged between 2012 and 2020 as an alternative proxy for social cohesion.15 Then, I reestimate Equation but use populism and social cohesiveness as alternative outcome variables. Figure 1 depicts the point estimate and 95% confidence interval of the coefficient on TFE. Accordingly, rugged individualism has a positive and negative impact on populism and social cohesiveness, respectively. The results are also robust to controlling for several geographic/agroclimatic attributes and state fixed effects. This suggests that deep-rooted cultural traits of rugged individualism hamper climate change mitigation efforts through inducing the prevalence of populism and social non-cohesiveness in the United States.
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[[Insert Figure 1 about here]] I also exploit individual-level data from various waves of CCES to explore the role of TFE in shaping populist attitudes and civic engagement. To this end, I use surveyed respondents vote share and favorability of Donald Trump to capture individuals populist attitudes. These two outcome variables take a value of one for survey participants expressing favorable rating of Trump in the pre-election phase and having voted for Trump in the Presidential primary or general elections, and zero otherwise. I also use a dummy variable taking a value of one for respondents voting in the Presidential elections between 2006 and 2020, and zero otherwise. I replicate the specification in Equation but use these measures of populism and civic engagement as alternative outcome variables. The individual-level evidence reported in Appendix Table A9 indicates that rugged individualism is associated with the prevalence of
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23 3 2 0 2 t h g i r y p o C . 3 2 0 2 , 6 2 r e b m e t p e S n o t s e u g
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For this purpose, I apply a two-stage estimation procedure following Acharya et al.s (2016) adoption of sequential g-estimation. The first-stage regression requires estimating the effect of TFE on the outcome variable controlling for the proposed mechanism (mediator) and a set of confounding characteristics, including pretreatment controls and post-treatment intermediate confounders.16 Then, I transform the outcome variable by subtracting the estimated effect of the mediator. The second-stage regression involves estimating the effect of TFE on the transformed outcome variable accounting for pre-treatment covariates; all intermediate confounders are excluded from the regressions. This yields the average controlled direct effect (ACDE) of TFE on pro-climate action, reflecting
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