TiCER Pilot Project 3

Status: Manuscript in medium preparation stage
Title: Support to Environmental Policy and its Association with Objective and Perceived Risk of Exposure
Investigators: Carol Goldsmith, Ki Eun Kang, and Arnold Vedlitz

Abstract
Scholars argue that risk exists through social construction and that perceived risk is a cognitive phenomenon (Boholm, 1998; Sjöberg, 1996; Wildavsky & Dake, 1990). We examine the relationship between actual risk exposure and risk perception, and we extend the research by looking at significant risk predictors (objective risk and perceived risk) of people’s attitudes toward environmental policies. This study aims to understand two main research questions: (1) whether environmental health threats impact people’s perception and (2) if public support and opposition to policies addressing environmental health threats are related to environmental health threat perception and/or environmental health threats level. We address these relationships by considering actual toxic waste sites (objective risk) to individual environmental health threat concerns (perceived risk) and environmental health threat policy support using the 2021 Texas survey. Our overall findings show that objective risk is important to people’s risk perception but not to environmental policy support. Our results also indicate that public environmental policy support tends to be driven by risk perception.