Extending the Civic Voluntarism Model: A cross-national study of environmental public sphere behavior

The public can influence environmental outcomes by engaging in the public sphere and shaping political and corporate decision-making. This study applies the Civic Voluntarism Model (CVM), a leading framework in political participation research, to explain Environmental Public Sphere Behavior (PSB), defined as environmentally motivated civic actions such as protesting, petitioning, and donating. We assess the predictive power of the full CVM and its four core modules (Resources, Psychological Engagement, Recruitment, and Environmental Issue Engagement) in a cross-national context, using data from the 2020 ISSP Environment module (N = 44,100; 28 countries). Multilevel regression models are used to assess both relationships and predictive performance. Our results demonstrate the utility of the CVM for understanding issue-specific forms of political participation such as PSB. However, we also find substantial cross-national variation: the CVM performs best in affluent countries with high Quality of Government.