When Does the American Public Care About the...Economy? Re-Examining the Relationship Between Public Opinion on the Economy and the Environment

Extant literature suggests that a public more concerned with the economy will express less concern for the environment. Yet, this work largely fails to account for the potential endogeneity between environmental, economic, and other political factors; further, the economy-environment tradeoff hypothesis hinges on the assumption that the causal arrow between economic and environmental attitudes runs in a specific direction. I use vector autoregression (VAR) with Granger-causality tests to examine the potential relationships between macro level opinions on the environment, economy, and the president in the United States between 1960 and 2020. Contrary to the conventional economy-environment tradeoff hypothesis, I find that increases in public concern for the environment are associated with decreases in public confidence in the economy. These results add to evidence challenging previous assumptions surrounding economic attitudes by demonstrating that public opinion on the environment leads, rather than follows, public opinion on the economy.