Malcolm Fairbrother
Biographic Data
| ID | 255045 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Malcolm Fairbrother |
| GIVEN NAMES | Malcolm |
| FAMILY NAME | Fairbrother |
| SIGNATURE | FAIRBROTHER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bristol |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1400-2141 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 822 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Conditions for environmental success: Dioxin pollution, the swedish pulp and paper industry, and a middle-range theory
Whether environmental sustainability is possible under capitalism is a highly divisive question for environmental scholars and advocates. Within sociology, this divide is reflected in an enduring debate between a Treadmill of Production (TOP) theory predicting worsening environmental problems under capitalism, and an Ecological Modernization (EM) perspective which provides reasons to expect improvements. Empirical support exists for both perspect…
Attitudes towards childbearing, population, and the environment: Prevalence, correlates, and connections with fertility outcomes in Sweden
Environmental concerns may influence personal fertility decisions and general opinions about childbearing and population dynamics, but research on this topic remains scarce. In two analyses based on large Swedish datasets (the Gender and Generation Survey [GGS], N = 8027, and a survey designed for this project, N = 683), we examine the connection between climate change worry and fertility outcomes and compare the prevalence of various concerns, b…
How do Europeans want to fight climate change? Comparing and explaining public support for a wide variety of policies
Most people are concerned about climate change and want policymakers to address it. But how? To investigate which policy options are more versus less popular, with whom, and why, we collected data in four European countries on attitudes toward 16 policies: taxes, bans, regulations, and subsidies/spending. We argue that support for different policies should reflect perceptions of policies’ net costs, and that such perceptions are likely influenced…
Trust, social movements, and the state
A large literature has developed around the concept of political trust, but what exactly political trust is remains ambiguous. Some studies present it as a narrower evaluation of the current government’s performance, while others treat it as a broader orientation towards the entire political system. This paper speaks to this question by examining the relationship between political trust and people’s views of two social movements: the environmenta…
Tackling toxins: Case studies of industrial pollutants and implications for climate policy
As scholars race to address the climate crisis, they have often treated the problem as sui generis and have only rarely sought to learn from prior efforts to make industrial operations greener. In this paper, we consider what can be learned from other shifts away from polluting substances. Drawing on literatures on corporate regulatory strategies and evolving regulatory interactions, we argue for a focus on configurations of regulatory scrutiny a…
Environmentalism around the globe. An introduction to the 2020 ISSP environment module and selected country-level findings
When trusting the state is not enough: Broader Institutional Trust and Public Support for Energy Transition Policies
Public opinion about climate policies: A review and call for more studies of what people want
Around the world, most people are aware of the problem of climate change, believe it is anthropogenic, and feel concerned about its potential consequences. What they think should be done about the problem, however, is less clear. Particularly due to widespread support among policy experts for putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions, more studies have investigated public attitudes towards carbon taxes than any other type of policy. Such studie…
Chains of trust: Networks of persistent resistance in digital activism
Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv
Issue-Areas, Sovereignty Costs, and North Americans’ Attitudes Toward Regional Cooperation
Studies of public opinion toward regionalism tend to rely on questions regarding trade integration and specific regional organizations. This narrow focus overlooks dimensions of regionalism that sit at the heart of international relations research on regions today. Instead, we argue that research should explore public preferences with respect to regional cooperation in different issue-areas. We find that people's views of regional cooperation in …
From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice within Government Agencies
Review of: From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice within Government Agencies, by Jill Lindsey Harrison. Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 2019. 328 pp. ISBN: 9780262537742
Can Bureaucrats Break Trust? Testing Cultural and Institutional Theories of Trust with Chinese Panel Data
What is the relationship between trust and the quality of political institutions in a society? According to an influential cultural perspective, social trust-the belief that most people can be trusted-is a value inculcated during individuals' formative years, and remains fixed afterward. A second perspective holds that social trust reflects experiences throughout the life course, particularly interactions with public institutions and officials. T…
Governing for Future Generations: How Political Trust Shapes Attitudes Towards Climate and Debt Policies
Policy decisions, and public preferences about them, often entail judgements about costs people should be willing to pay for the benefit of future generations. Economic analyses discount policies’ future benefits based on expectations about increasing standards of living, while empirical studies in psychology have found future-oriented people are more motivated to protect the environment. In this article, using original surveys and survey experim…
Chinese Citizen Satisfaction with Government Performance during Covid-19
While foreign pundits have alternatively blamed and praised the Chinese government’s handling of the COVID-19 virus, little is known about how citizens within China understand this performance. This article considers how satisfied Chinese citizens are with their government’s performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. It first considers the impact of authoritarian control, political culture, and/or actual government performance on citizen satisfact…
No escape from tradition? Source country culture and gendered employment patterns among immigrants in Sweden
The study aims to explore whether gendered family roles in the country of origin and the country of destination explain labor market outcomes for immigrants in Sweden. We examine the assumptions of the source country culture literature-that traditional gender norms in immigrants' source countries drive women's employment in the new country-by focusing on gender differences and exploring group-and individual-level mechanisms, notably, that of care…
An updated OECD framework on drivers of trust in public institutions to meet current and future challenges
Trust between citizens and their governments is crucial for the legitimacy and functioning of democracies. This paper discusses the main determinants of people's trust in public institutions and their measurement, in times of crisis as well as for a long-term, strong, inclusive and green recovery. It presents evidence on the great variation in the levels and drivers of trust across public institutions, across levels of government within countries…
Experiences matter: A longitudinal study of individual-level sources of declining social trust in the United States
The US has experienced a substantial decline in social trust in recent decades. Surprisingly few studies analyze whether individual-level explanations can account for this decrease. We use three-wave panel data from the General Social Survey (2006-2014) to study the effects of four possible individual-level sources of changes in social trust: job loss, social ties, income, and confidence in political institutions. Findings from fixed-effects line…
Fixed and random effects models: Making an informed choice
This paper assesses the options available to researchers analysing multilevel (including longitudinal) data, with the aim of supporting good methodological decision-making. Given the confusion in the literature about the key properties of fixed and random effects (FE and RE) models, we present these models’ capabilities and limitations. We also discuss the within-between RE model, sometimes misleadingly labelled a ‘hybrid’ model, showing that it …
Political trust and the relationship between climate change beliefs and support for fossil fuel taxes: Evidence from a survey of 23 European countries
Multilevel Models for the Analysis of Comparative Survey Data: Common Problems and Some Solutions
Open Relationship Prevalence, Characteristics, and Correlates in a Nationally Representative Sample of Canadian Adults
Open relationships are those in which individuals agree to participate in sexual and/or emotional and romantic interactions with more than one partner. Accurate estimates of the prevalence of open relationships, based on representative, unbiased samples, are few, and there are none from outside of the United States. We present findings from a nationally representative sample of 2,003 Canadian adults, administered in 2017 via an online questionnai…
Free Traders: Elites, Democracy, and the Rise of Globalization in North America
When Will People Pay to Pollute? Environmental Taxes, Political Trust and Experimental Evidence from Britain
This article presents results from survey experiments investigating conditions under which Britons are willing to pay taxes on polluting activities. People are no more willing if revenues are hypothecated for spending on environmental protection, while making such taxes more relevant to people – by naming petrol and electricity as products to which they will apply – has a modestly negative effect. Public willingness increases sharply if people ar…
Environmental attitudes and the politics of distrust
This article reviews recent studies showing that distrust lies at the heart of the serious crisis of sustainability that humanity is failing to address, insofar as distrust of environmental scientists, communicators, and policymakers are all undermining public demand for better public policies. Generalised distrust of scientists is rare, but political distrust is ubiquitous, such that even people who are concerned about environmental problems are…
Pollution Prophylaxis? Social Capital and Environmental Inequality
Objective One major theory of environmental inequality is that firms follow a political path of least resistance when locating polluting facilities in low‐income and minority communities. Such communities, this theory suggests, lack the social capital that allows others to keep such facilities at bay. We will test this argument. Methods We investigate whether communities across the United States are located further from stationary sources of airb…
Two Multilevel Modeling Techniques for Analyzing Comparative Longitudinal Survey Datasets
Increasing numbers of comparative survey datasets span multiple waves. Moving beyond purely cross-sectional analyses, multilevel longitudinal analyses of such datasets should generate substantively important insights into the political, social and economic correlates of many individual-level outcomes of interest (attitudes, behaviors, etc.). This article describes two simple techniques for extracting such insights, which allow change over time in…
The Random Effects in Multilevel Models: Getting Them Wrong and Getting Them Right
Many surveys of respondents from multiple countries or subnational regions have now been fielded on multiple occasions. Social scientists are regularly using multilevel models to analyse the data generated by such surveys, investigating variation across both space and time. We show, however, that such models are usually specified erroneously. They typically omit one or more relevant random effects, thereby ignoring important clustering in the dat…
Political trust and the relationship between climate change beliefs and support for fossil fuel taxes: Evidence from a survey of 23 European countries
Does inequality erode social trust? Results from multilevel models of US states and counties
Open Relationship Prevalence, Characteristics, and Correlates in a Nationally Representative Sample of Canadian Adults
Open relationships are those in which individuals agree to participate in sexual and/or emotional and romantic interactions with more than one partner. Accurate estimates of the prevalence of open relationships, based on representative, unbiased samples, are few, and there are none from outside of the United States. We present findings from a nationally representative sample of 2,003 Canadian adults, administered in 2017 via an online questionnai…
Rich People, Poor People, and Environmental Concern: Evidence across Nations and Time
What makes people concerned about environmental degradation and willing to pay for its prevention? Recent survey research argues that richer people are greener—that residents of more economically developed countries, as well as relatively wealthier people within countries, are more concerned about the state of the natural environment and more willing to pay to protect it. This article questions this view, using survey data on multiple distinct as…
When Will People Pay to Pollute? Environmental Taxes, Political Trust and Experimental Evidence from Britain
This article presents results from survey experiments investigating conditions under which Britons are willing to pay taxes on polluting activities. People are no more willing if revenues are hypothecated for spending on environmental protection, while making such taxes more relevant to people – by naming petrol and electricity as products to which they will apply – has a modestly negative effect. Public willingness increases sharply if people ar…
Trust and Public Support for Environmental Protection in Diverse National Contexts
Malcolm Fairbrother Sociological Science, June 8, 2016 DOI 10.15195/v3.a17 Abstract Worldwide, most people share scientists' concerns about environmental problems, but reject the solution that policy experts most strongly recommend: putting a price on pollution
Multilevel Models for the Analysis of Comparative Survey Data: Common Problems and Some Solutions
Experiences matter: A longitudinal study of individual-level sources of declining social trust in the United States
The US has experienced a substantial decline in social trust in recent decades. Surprisingly few studies analyze whether individual-level explanations can account for this decrease. We use three-wave panel data from the General Social Survey (2006-2014) to study the effects of four possible individual-level sources of changes in social trust: job loss, social ties, income, and confidence in political institutions. Findings from fixed-effects line…
Environmental attitudes and the politics of distrust
This article reviews recent studies showing that distrust lies at the heart of the serious crisis of sustainability that humanity is failing to address, insofar as distrust of environmental scientists, communicators, and policymakers are all undermining public demand for better public policies. Generalised distrust of scientists is rare, but political distrust is ubiquitous, such that even people who are concerned about environmental problems are…
Chinese Citizen Satisfaction with Government Performance during Covid-19
While foreign pundits have alternatively blamed and praised the Chinese government’s handling of the COVID-19 virus, little is known about how citizens within China understand this performance. This article considers how satisfied Chinese citizens are with their government’s performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. It first considers the impact of authoritarian control, political culture, and/or actual government performance on citizen satisfact…
Economists, Capitalists, and the Making of Globalization: North American Free Trade in Comparative-Historical Perspective
Why did globalization happen? Current explanations point to a variety of conditions under which states have made the free market policy changes driving international economic integration since the 1980s. Such accounts disagree, however, about the key actors involved. This article provides a reconciliation, showing how two different combinations of actors, and two different political economic pathways, have led to globalization in recent decades. …
Making Neoliberalism Possible: The State's Organization of Business Support for Nafta in Mexico
In shifting from nationalist/statist to neoliberal economic policies, states seek out and build alliances with other advocates-especially large capital-and work to disorganize political opponents-including small business. This article examines the politics of the private sector's involvement in trade liberalization in the developing world through a study of Mexico's proposal, negotiation, and ratification of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agr…
Governing for Future Generations: How Political Trust Shapes Attitudes Towards Climate and Debt Policies
Policy decisions, and public preferences about them, often entail judgements about costs people should be willing to pay for the benefit of future generations. Economic analyses discount policies’ future benefits based on expectations about increasing standards of living, while empirical studies in psychology have found future-oriented people are more motivated to protect the environment. In this article, using original surveys and survey experim…
An updated OECD framework on drivers of trust in public institutions to meet current and future challenges
Trust between citizens and their governments is crucial for the legitimacy and functioning of democracies. This paper discusses the main determinants of people's trust in public institutions and their measurement, in times of crisis as well as for a long-term, strong, inclusive and green recovery. It presents evidence on the great variation in the levels and drivers of trust across public institutions, across levels of government within countries…
Can Bureaucrats Break Trust? Testing Cultural and Institutional Theories of Trust with Chinese Panel Data
What is the relationship between trust and the quality of political institutions in a society? According to an influential cultural perspective, social trust-the belief that most people can be trusted-is a value inculcated during individuals' formative years, and remains fixed afterward. A second perspective holds that social trust reflects experiences throughout the life course, particularly interactions with public institutions and officials. T…
No escape from tradition? Source country culture and gendered employment patterns among immigrants in Sweden
The study aims to explore whether gendered family roles in the country of origin and the country of destination explain labor market outcomes for immigrants in Sweden. We examine the assumptions of the source country culture literature-that traditional gender norms in immigrants' source countries drive women's employment in the new country-by focusing on gender differences and exploring group-and individual-level mechanisms, notably, that of care…
Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications
The Cold War and geography’s quantitative revolution: Some messy reflections on Barnes’ geographical underworld
Pollution Prophylaxis? Social Capital and Environmental Inequality
Objective One major theory of environmental inequality is that firms follow a political path of least resistance when locating polluting facilities in low‐income and minority communities. Such communities, this theory suggests, lack the social capital that allows others to keep such facilities at bay. We will test this argument. Methods We investigate whether communities across the United States are located further from stationary sources of airb…
Trust, social movements, and the state
A large literature has developed around the concept of political trust, but what exactly political trust is remains ambiguous. Some studies present it as a narrower evaluation of the current government’s performance, while others treat it as a broader orientation towards the entire political system. This paper speaks to this question by examining the relationship between political trust and people’s views of two social movements: the environmenta…
Externalities: Why environmental sociology should bring them in
The concept of externalities represents the core of environmental economics but appears much less in sociology and other social sciences. This article presents the concept of externalities and makes a case for its usefulness, noting reasons why environmental sociologists should like it and use it more than they do currently. The concept is closely tied to theories – of why environmental problems occur and how they can be addressed – which contrad…
When trusting the state is not enough: Broader Institutional Trust and Public Support for Energy Transition Policies
The Freedom of the State? Recent NDP Governments and a Reply to the Globalization Sceptics
Un grand nombre d'anciens partisans du Nouveau Parti démocratique, particulièrement les organisations syndicales et les défenseurs des pauvres, ont déclaré avoir été abandonnés par les gouvernements NPD en Ontario et en Colombie‐Britannique pendant les années 1990. Cet article examine cette critique à la lumière du meilleur argument théorique disponible pour penser que les politiques du NPD auraient pu être beaucoup plus sociales sans aboutir à r…
The Freedom of the State? Recent NDP Governments and a Reply to the Globalization Sceptics
Un grand nombre d'anciens partisans du Nouveau Parti démocratique, particulièrement les organisations syndicales et les défenseurs des pauvres, ont déclaré avoir été abandonnés par les gouvernements NPD en Ontario et en Colombie‐Britannique pendant les années 1990. Cet article examine cette critique à la lumière du meilleur argument théorique disponible pour penser que les politiques du NPD auraient pu être beaucoup plus sociales sans aboutir à r…
Making Neoliberalism Possible: The State's Organization of Business Support for Nafta in Mexico
In shifting from nationalist/statist to neoliberal economic policies, states seek out and build alliances with other advocates-especially large capital-and work to disorganize political opponents-including small business. This article examines the politics of the private sector's involvement in trade liberalization in the developing world through a study of Mexico's proposal, negotiation, and ratification of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agr…
The Cold War and geography’s quantitative revolution: Some messy reflections on Barnes’ geographical underworld
Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications
Trade policymaking in the real world: Elites' conflicting worldviews and North American integration
Research on trade policymaking often fails to recognize important disagreements between economists, on the one hand, and economic and political elites, on the other. As a consequence, many studies overstate the prevalence of economists’ neoclassical trade theory among businesspeople and politicians, and its intellectual influence on the practice of trade negotiations and policymaking. While economists, politicians, and businesspeople often do sup…
Rich People, Poor People, and Environmental Concern: Evidence across Nations and Time
What makes people concerned about environmental degradation and willing to pay for its prevention? Recent survey research argues that richer people are greener—that residents of more economically developed countries, as well as relatively wealthier people within countries, are more concerned about the state of the natural environment and more willing to pay to protect it. This article questions this view, using survey data on multiple distinct as…
Does inequality erode social trust? Results from multilevel models of US states and counties
Two Multilevel Modeling Techniques for Analyzing Comparative Longitudinal Survey Datasets
Increasing numbers of comparative survey datasets span multiple waves. Moving beyond purely cross-sectional analyses, multilevel longitudinal analyses of such datasets should generate substantively important insights into the political, social and economic correlates of many individual-level outcomes of interest (attitudes, behaviors, etc.). This article describes two simple techniques for extracting such insights, which allow change over time in…
Economists, Capitalists, and the Making of Globalization: North American Free Trade in Comparative-Historical Perspective
Why did globalization happen? Current explanations point to a variety of conditions under which states have made the free market policy changes driving international economic integration since the 1980s. Such accounts disagree, however, about the key actors involved. This article provides a reconciliation, showing how two different combinations of actors, and two different political economic pathways, have led to globalization in recent decades. …
Trust and Public Support for Environmental Protection in Diverse National Contexts
Malcolm Fairbrother Sociological Science, June 8, 2016 DOI 10.15195/v3.a17 Abstract Worldwide, most people share scientists' concerns about environmental problems, but reject the solution that policy experts most strongly recommend: putting a price on pollution
Externalities: Why environmental sociology should bring them in
The concept of externalities represents the core of environmental economics but appears much less in sociology and other social sciences. This article presents the concept of externalities and makes a case for its usefulness, noting reasons why environmental sociologists should like it and use it more than they do currently. The concept is closely tied to theories – of why environmental problems occur and how they can be addressed – which contrad…
The Random Effects in Multilevel Models: Getting Them Wrong and Getting Them Right
Many surveys of respondents from multiple countries or subnational regions have now been fielded on multiple occasions. Social scientists are regularly using multilevel models to analyse the data generated by such surveys, investigating variation across both space and time. We show, however, that such models are usually specified erroneously. They typically omit one or more relevant random effects, thereby ignoring important clustering in the dat…
Environmental attitudes and the politics of distrust
This article reviews recent studies showing that distrust lies at the heart of the serious crisis of sustainability that humanity is failing to address, insofar as distrust of environmental scientists, communicators, and policymakers are all undermining public demand for better public policies. Generalised distrust of scientists is rare, but political distrust is ubiquitous, such that even people who are concerned about environmental problems are…
Pollution Prophylaxis? Social Capital and Environmental Inequality
Objective One major theory of environmental inequality is that firms follow a political path of least resistance when locating polluting facilities in low‐income and minority communities. Such communities, this theory suggests, lack the social capital that allows others to keep such facilities at bay. We will test this argument. Methods We investigate whether communities across the United States are located further from stationary sources of airb…
Fixed and random effects models: Making an informed choice
This paper assesses the options available to researchers analysing multilevel (including longitudinal) data, with the aim of supporting good methodological decision-making. Given the confusion in the literature about the key properties of fixed and random effects (FE and RE) models, we present these models’ capabilities and limitations. We also discuss the within-between RE model, sometimes misleadingly labelled a ‘hybrid’ model, showing that it …
Political trust and the relationship between climate change beliefs and support for fossil fuel taxes: Evidence from a survey of 23 European countries
Multilevel Models for the Analysis of Comparative Survey Data: Common Problems and Some Solutions
Open Relationship Prevalence, Characteristics, and Correlates in a Nationally Representative Sample of Canadian Adults
Open relationships are those in which individuals agree to participate in sexual and/or emotional and romantic interactions with more than one partner. Accurate estimates of the prevalence of open relationships, based on representative, unbiased samples, are few, and there are none from outside of the United States. We present findings from a nationally representative sample of 2,003 Canadian adults, administered in 2017 via an online questionnai…
Free Traders: Elites, Democracy, and the Rise of Globalization in North America
When Will People Pay to Pollute? Environmental Taxes, Political Trust and Experimental Evidence from Britain
This article presents results from survey experiments investigating conditions under which Britons are willing to pay taxes on polluting activities. People are no more willing if revenues are hypothecated for spending on environmental protection, while making such taxes more relevant to people – by naming petrol and electricity as products to which they will apply – has a modestly negative effect. Public willingness increases sharply if people ar…
Governing for Future Generations: How Political Trust Shapes Attitudes Towards Climate and Debt Policies
Policy decisions, and public preferences about them, often entail judgements about costs people should be willing to pay for the benefit of future generations. Economic analyses discount policies’ future benefits based on expectations about increasing standards of living, while empirical studies in psychology have found future-oriented people are more motivated to protect the environment. In this article, using original surveys and survey experim…
Chinese Citizen Satisfaction with Government Performance during Covid-19
While foreign pundits have alternatively blamed and praised the Chinese government’s handling of the COVID-19 virus, little is known about how citizens within China understand this performance. This article considers how satisfied Chinese citizens are with their government’s performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. It first considers the impact of authoritarian control, political culture, and/or actual government performance on citizen satisfact…
No escape from tradition? Source country culture and gendered employment patterns among immigrants in Sweden
The study aims to explore whether gendered family roles in the country of origin and the country of destination explain labor market outcomes for immigrants in Sweden. We examine the assumptions of the source country culture literature-that traditional gender norms in immigrants' source countries drive women's employment in the new country-by focusing on gender differences and exploring group-and individual-level mechanisms, notably, that of care…
An updated OECD framework on drivers of trust in public institutions to meet current and future challenges
Trust between citizens and their governments is crucial for the legitimacy and functioning of democracies. This paper discusses the main determinants of people's trust in public institutions and their measurement, in times of crisis as well as for a long-term, strong, inclusive and green recovery. It presents evidence on the great variation in the levels and drivers of trust across public institutions, across levels of government within countries…
Experiences matter: A longitudinal study of individual-level sources of declining social trust in the United States
The US has experienced a substantial decline in social trust in recent decades. Surprisingly few studies analyze whether individual-level explanations can account for this decrease. We use three-wave panel data from the General Social Survey (2006-2014) to study the effects of four possible individual-level sources of changes in social trust: job loss, social ties, income, and confidence in political institutions. Findings from fixed-effects line…
Political science (26 works) · Economics (22 works) · Politics (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Political economy (10 works) · Environmental Education and Sustainability (9 works) · Climate Change Communication and Perception (8 works)