Who Is Afraid Of The Dark? Some Evidence From A Cross-Country Investigation

It is a fact that energy saving depends not only on countries’ environmental policies but also on citizens’ ways of responding to these actions. This indicates the need to thoroughly investigate how households’ attitudes are shaped to understand the driving factors enhancing pro-environmental attitudes. However, it is also important to understand how people judge countries’ environmental performances. To the best of our knowledge, there are few studies that have tried to observe people’s evaluations and reactions to the way countries conduct their economic activities or, generally, to the way they exploit and produce the energy required. Hence, we jointly considered both countries’ environmental performances and their citizens’ feelings about them. In particular, we focused on two main aspects: (i) citizens’ fear of energy cutoff and (ii) related preferences for the adoption of green policies. This study aimed to underline that an energy-intensive economy scares citizens, who claim for green policies as a reaction to this perception. In this case, people are claiming for more environmental protection. All of these lead to the conclusion that it is not viable to implement a policy by sidestepping the potential response of citizens, and it is not convenient to disregard the current preferences of citizens while framing future policies.