Non-Violent, Democratic and Green Movements in the Global East and South? Analyzing World Values Survey Data in 58 Countries and Territories from 2017–2021

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30884/jogs/2024.02.07

Arno Tausch, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa

This study focuses on the analysis of public opinion survey data on trust and participation in environmental movements around the world contained in the World Values Survey, covering 58 countries and territories fr om 2017 onwards. Are we witnessing a greening of the Global East and South? And are these movements characterized by non-violence and the rejection of terrorism? Most of the existing, highly influential studies on this topic are based on earlier waves of the World Values Survey with only a limited number of countries fr om the Global East and South covered in the surveys.

Our multivariate analysis suggests that, in today's world, it is rather the Global East and South that are 'greening' and where environmental movements enjoy the highest levels of participation and confidence. We also develop a parametric, factor-analytic index of non-violent and democratic green movements around the globe.

Keywords: environmental movements, global comparisons, opinion surveys, global south, World Values Survey, European Values Survey, terrorism, political violence, BRICS.

1. Introduction

This study focuses on the analysis of public opinion survey data on trust in and participation in environmental movements fr om the World Values Survey, covering 58 countries and territories from 2017 onwards, developing earlier and recent studies on the subject (Tausch 2023). Are we witnessing a democratic and non-violent ‘greening’ of the Global East and South? Most of the existing, highly influential studies on this topic are based on earlier waves of the World Values Survey, with only a limited number of countries from the Global East and South included in the surveys. Especially the BRICS countries, which currently comprise Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, have been overlooked in earlier studies.¹

At the latest since France's Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin spoke of ‘eco-terrorism’ in November 2022 and issued what the newspaper Le Monde called a ‘clear declaration of war’ against environmentalists (Le Monde, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2022/11/11/the-french-government-s-use-of-the-term-eco-ter...), there has been a growing concern in many government circles, especially in the Western world, about a growing potential for political violence and terrorism emanating from ecological movements. In the social sciences, there has already been an extensive debate on ecological radicalism based on data from the World Values Survey (Egan 1996; Julkif 2022, 2023a, 2023b; Puranen and Welander 2017; Schumann, Rottweiler, and Gill 2020; Treistmann 2021).

With regard to the question of the non-violence of ecological movements, which, as mentioned above, has become virulent in the global political debate, the focus here – in contrast to the study by Tausch 2023 – is now on the nexus of

·    ecological movements;

·    support for democratic structures;

·    the acceptance of political violence.

We test these relationships using multivariate methods and show, for the 58 countries analysed, the strength of the support for ecological movements, the support for democratic structures and the acceptance of political violence and terrorism and how these phenomena are related. Our study includes all countries for which data are available according to the World Values Survey and thus also provides important information on the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China. World Values Survey data from 2017 from South Africa are missing.

In the following sections, we will present the background and the existing studies, followed by a brief overview of the methodology, and then present our findings and conclusions.

The importance of the issues analysed here cannot be underestimated. Brand (2015: 20–23; Brand and Lang 2015) argues that, in contrast to the concept and strategy of sustainable development in the 1990s, a green economy now appears to be attractive to relevant socio-economic actors. Technologies are available to develop renewable energy sources or electronic engines for cars, and microelectronics play a much more important role today than 20 years ago. And there is another dynamic, namely the current crisis, the main cause of which is an enormous amount of over-accumulated capital looking for new investment opportunities. Brand (2015, 2023) and Brand and Lang (2015) also point out that finance capital has discovered agriculture, land, infrastructure and environmental protection as new areas of investment, creating opportunities for a few and threatening the livelihoods of many, especially in the Global South.

2. Background Developments at the Global Level

As we have already highlighted in an extensive working paper (Tausch 2023), for Dunlap and York (2008), the presumed lack of widespread concern for the environment in LDCs follows from the assumption in many current global values studies that environmental quality is a higher-order, quality-of-life value that poor people struggling to meet basic needs cannot afford to support. Dunlap and York (2008) point out that leading values research (see below) assumes a lack of environmental concern among citizens in the world's poorer nations. Post-materialist, pro-environmental values, the argument goes, are far more prevalent in wealthy nations than in poor ones.

And yet, according to Dunlap and York (2008), recent advances in environmental political economy, which examine the relationships between variables such as globalisation, carbon emissions, population growth, urbanisation and so on, would suggest that global values research would also be obliged to produce evidence focusing specifically on the growing importance of the ecology movement in the countries of the Global East and South.

We also pointed out already in Tausch (2023), that, for example, in a widely read study on the political ecology of the environment, Jorgenson (2012) argues that transnational corporations are building new or acquiring existing facilities in less developed countries – such as in Asia and Latin America – to take advantage of lower production costs and more permissive environmental laws. This shift in production, Jorgenson argues, has contributed to an increase in carbon emissions in less developed countries, even though many of the products are consumed in developed countries. Jorgenson (2012) argues that the dynamics of the global economic system require that a conceptualisation of shifts be incorporated into the assessment of environment-economic development relationships.

The study of the interaction between the level of development – or, if you wish, existential security – and the state of the environment involves several highly intricate methodological issues. In a highly influential study on this subject, Liddle (2014) critically discusses the assumptions of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC; see also https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/economics-econometrics-and-finance/environmental-kuznets-curve).

Dinda (2004), in his also very influential study on the subject, stipulated that the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis postulates an inverted-U-shaped relationship between different pollutants and per capita income, i.e., environmental pressure increases up to a certain level as income goes up; after that, it decreases. Dinda (2004) highlights that the common point of all studies is the assertion that environmental quality deteriorates in the early stages of economic development/growth and subsequently improves in the later stages.

Liddle (2014) makes the point that a variable, which is particularly strongly related to global value change, is population growth (see also Tausch, Heshmati, and Karoui 2014) and its impact on the level of national carbon emissions has not been explicitly explored. Liddle (2014) also point out that urbanization may lead to higher emissions/energy consumption through the link between urbanization and industrialization, i.e., the shift from agriculture to industry and services. Such shifts will even increase the importance of the question, how economic changes in the Global South affect the strength of the environmental movement in the Global South.

In a recent study on the globalisation-oriented drivers of the global environmental crisis, Tausch and Heshmati (2013) have closed the loop between the usual studies on globalisation and the usual studies on environmental degradation. The study showed that ‘globalization’ measures like high levels of foreign savings, employment in free production zones as a percentage of the total population, the penetration of MNCs, and large-scale immigration have a serious detrimental effect on environmental data.

3. The World Values Survey Analyses on Environmental Movements

In the following, we will attempt to provide our readers with a brief synthesis of the established wisdom on global opinion surveys of environmental issues (for a summary, see Tausch 2023; furthermore Abramson and Inglehart 2009; Dunlap and York 2008; Dutcher 2007; Franzen and Vogl 2013; Inglehart 2009; Inglehart and Baker 2000; Inglehart and Abramson 1994). Inglehart (see Abramson and Inglehart 2009; Inglehart 2009; Inglehart and Baker 2000) maintained the position that value priorities in advanced industrial society will tend to shift away from materialist concerns about economic and physical security towards a greater emphasis on freedom, self-expression, and the quality of life, or post-materialist values. Arguing that differences in the formative socialization of young Europeans and their elders have led younger birth cohorts to place a relatively high priority on freedom and self-expression, Inglehart (see Abramson and Inglehart 2009; Inglehart 2009; Inglehart and Baker 2000) suggests that future intergenerational population replacement would bring about a shift towards new value priorities. The growth of post-materialist values will contribute to the decline of social class voting and to the rise of new social movements, particularly environmentalist movements and parties. Changing value priorities may, according to Inglehart (see Abramson and Inglehart 2009; Inglehart 2009; Inglehart and Baker 2000; Inglehart and Abramson 1994), reshape the nature of political cleavages and the political meaning of left and right, giving rise to a new political axis. This new axis, according to Inglehart (see Abramson and Inglehart 2009; Inglehart, 2009; Inglehart and Baker 2000), cuts across the traditional left-right dimension, characterized by radical reform parties and movements at one pole and right-wing authoritarian parties and movements like the Christian Coalition, the National Front, and the Republikaner at the other. Inglehart (see Abramson and Inglehart 2009; Inglehart 2009; Inglehart and Baker 2000) shows that there is a clear trend towards post-materialism, largely resulting from intergenerational population replacement. Moreover, the growth of post-materialism has occurred despite, rather than because of, rising levels of unemployment.

For Inglehart (see Abramson and Inglehart 2009; Inglehart 2009; Inglehart and Baker 2000), the shift from materialist to post-materialist values is not a uniquely Western phenomenon. Rather, it can be found in societies with very different institutions and cultural traditions. The rise of post-materialist values is closely linked to prosperity and seems to occur wherever a society has experienced sufficient economic growth in recent decades for younger birth cohorts to experience significantly greater economic security during their formative years than older cohorts experienced. Intergenerational differences in values reflect a society's rate of economic growth. Economic growth is, of course, only one factor contributing to security or insecurity, but it happens to be (1) an important part of the story and (2) one for which we have relatively good cross-national and cross-time data. Inglehart (see Abramson and Inglehart 2009; Inglehart 2009; Inglehart and Baker 2000) argues that war, domestic upheaval, and ethnic conflict can also have a major impact on feelings of security, but precisely because they tend to be situation-specific (and are less readily quantified) they are more difficult to analyse empirically. Inter-generational differences are remarkably robust. According to Inglehart (see Abramson and Inglehart 2009; Inglehart 2009; Inglehart and Baker 2000), in Western Europe, clear and substantial differences between the values of younger and older birth cohorts persisted through the recessions of the mid-1970s and the early 1980s. The post-materialist shift in values does not simply reflect current conditions: it also has a long-term component that seems to reflect the distinctive formative circumstances experienced by given birth cohorts as much as 40 or 50 years ago.

Based on their data analysis of the World Values Survey and Gallup's 24-nation ‘Health of the Planet’ (HOP) survey, for Dunlap and York (2008) the crucial issue is that both conventional wisdom and social science explanations of environmental concern as stemming from post-materialist values, which would predict consistently positive relationships between citizens' concern for the environment and levels of national affluence, but clearly the first three waves of the now seven waves of the WVS (see methodology section, below) do not produce supportive evidence for either. When one considers that many of the WVS items appear to be biased in favour of more pro-environmental responses from the public in wealthy than in poor nations, the results become even more noteworthy. Given the emphasis that advocates of post-materialism, such as Inglehart, place on public willingness to pay for environmental protection, and the fact that the most straightforward indicators of such willingness are consistently (though not always significantly) negatively correlated with national affluence, Dunlap and York (2008) find the WVS results are particularly damaging – and even puzzling.

Dunlap and York (2008) conclude that those who have followed the rapidly accumulating evidence of citizen action for environmental protection in poor and developing nations around the world will not be surprised that environmental activism in these countries often reflects widespread public sentiment. It is clear that both environmental activism and public support for environmental protection have become global phenomena and are no longer – if they ever were – limited to the wealthy nations of the world.

Dunlap and York (2008) also maintain that while it may take different forms, concern for the environment has obviously spread well beyond wealthy nations, and it is time for both policymakers and social scientists to revise their views accordingly. To conceptualize environmental quality as something that only the wealthy can afford, and the poor care little about, does violence to the facts.

Franzen and Vogl (2013) analyse the development of environmental concern using the three waves of the environmental modules of the International Social Survey Programme. The results show that environmental concern is closely correlated with the wealth of the nations. However, environmental concern has declined in almost all nations slightly over the last two decades. The decline was less in countries with improving economic conditions, suggesting that economic growth helps to maintain higher levels of environmental concern. The results of Franzen and Vogl (2013) show that GDP has a positive effect on respondents' environmental concern, confirming the finding from the cross-sectional data. Overall, environmental concern decreased slightly in almost all countries (the exception is Chile). However, the decline was weaker in countries wh ere GDP has increaseв more in since 1993. This finding, Franzen and Vogl (2013) argue, is compatible with the results obtained from a time series analysis of public attitudes towards climate change in the United States. Controversies among political elites, particularly scepticism regarding climate change among Republican leaders, contributed most strongly to the decline. Franzen and Vogl (2013) think it is very likely that after the 2008, the financial crisis diverted attention from environmental concerns.

The fact that environmental concern has declined over the past two decades is, of course, bad news for the prospects of protecting the planet, according to Franzen and Vogl (2013). It suggests that governments willing to implement measures for environmental protection will find it increasingly difficult to win public support.

We have already mentioned that there has already been an extensive debate in the social sciences on ecological radicalism based on data from the World Values Survey (Egan 1996; Julkif 2022, 2023a, 2023b; Puranen and Welander 2017; Schumann, Rottweiler and Gill 2020; Treistmann 2021). As our article focuses on the ecological movements around the globe, we can only briefly highlight some of the most important research results in this context. For example, Julkif (2023a) found in his multilevel model and a cross-national survey of 125,129 respondents from 72 countries that state terror and poorer perceptions of human rights correlate with a lower tolerance of deviance. In another study, Julkif (2023b) found that subjective perceptions of human rights influence the justification of terrorism at the individual level, net of individual and country-level controls. Utilizing the data from the seventh wave of the World Values Survey and 65,668 respondents from 52 countries, his study found that those who report greater interference in their lives by security officials and those who perceive the country to be run more democratically are more likely to find terrorism justified, while those who perceive less respect for human rights are less likely to do so. According to this approach, the effect of state terror on the justification of terrorism is moderated by perceived democracy, with those who perceive the country to be run more democratically more likely to find terrorism justified when state terror is high. Julkif (2022) using the World Values Survey sample of 41,178 respondents from 31 countries, used a mixed-effects logistic regression with country-level random intercepts to answer the research question and test the hypothesis: lower political efficacy predicts lower support for terrorism, while political violence is not significantly affected. The interaction between self-efficacy and economic insecurity was significant, with high economic security and low self-efficacy predicting more justifiability of terrorism.

Schumann, Rottweiler, and Gill (2020) found that public support for terrorism reflects people's sympathy for terrorist groups or tactics; it is influenced by and, in turn, shapes terrorists' campaigns as well as counter-terrorism measures. To date, long-term trends in public opinion on terrorism have been assessed in case studies and through descriptive statistics. Systematic analyses that specify whether and how public support for terrorism has changed over time are not available. Schumann, Rottweiler, and Gill (2020) addressed this gap in the literature and conducted time-series analyses of eight waves of data (2004–2011) from the Pew Global Attitudes Survey. Including responses from 15 Muslim-majority countries, N =43,255, Schumann, Rottweiler, and Gill (2020) showed that the percentage of people who believed that suicide terrorism was justified decreased between 2005 and 2007, after which support remained at a lower level (one structural breakpoint). The results also highlighted that, depending on how public opinion was operationalised, the same data could provide an opposing narrative about support for terrorism. Notably, when analyses were replicated using a mean composite score of the response options ‘often’, ‘sometimes’, and ‘rarely justified’, the percentage of people who thought that terrorism was ‘ever justified’ was reduced in 2005 before increasing again in 2008 (two structural breakpoints). Pre-registration of studies is therefore crucial to avoid selective analyses.

Treistmann (2021) believes that research on the causes of terrorism tends to focus on broad national-level trends without examining how such factors influence individuals and their propensity for political violence. Meanwhile, theories of radicalization have yielded important insights into how individuals come to embrace terrorism, but transformation does not occur in a vacuum, divorced from contextual factors. Treistmann (2021) makes therefore an attempt to bridge macro-micro linkages to better understand the causes of terrorism, and focuses on levels of socio-political exclusion within a country. Using multilevel analysis, Treistmann (2021) finds a consistently positive relationship between levels of social exclusion and individual support for terrorism.

Tausch and Neriah (2023), for their part, found that holding constant the non-linear effects of the United Nations Human Development Index on political and social variables, the partial correlations reveal the interesting details of support for the acceptance of political violence in the countries of the world system. On the one hand, of course, it is clear that people who support terrorism as a political, ideological or religious 'measure' also support political violence. It is also clear that countries with a high concentration of wealth in the hands of the richest 1 per cent are predestined to become a breeding ground for the acceptance of political violence. Tausch and Neriah 2023 also found that countries with a high level of long-term social security, as measured by social security expenditure as a percentage of gross domestic product according to the measurement methods of the International Labour Organisation in Geneva, are less likely to accept political violence. The prison population per 100,000 inhabitants is significantly and positively correlated with the acceptance of political violence, holding constant the non-linear effects of the human development index on the dependent variable. In the more than 70 countries for which data are available, there is a significant, negative, and surely surprising to many, correlation between the proportion of the population that is Muslim and the acceptance of political violence. However, Tausch and Neriah, 2023 show that the idea that political satisfaction can be used to virtually sell lower levels of acceptance of political violence is not borne out by the facts. Paradoxically, when satisfaction with the country's labour market, social policies, standard of living, education system, jobs, national government, health system, choices available in a country, and even when overall life satisfaction is very high, acceptance of political violence is also very high. Tausch and Neriah (2023) also maintain that sufficient further research should attempt to test the hypothesis that acceptance of political violence has increased precisely in those countries wh ere overall satisfaction with political and social conditions was high in the middle of the second decade of our millennium. Tausch and Neriah (2023) stress that the Gallup-based data on life satisfaction were collected by the United Nations in the middle of the second decade, while the data on the acceptance of political violence were documented in the very recent World Values Survey from 2017 to 2022.

4. Methodology and Data

4.1. The World Values Survey data

Launched in 1981, the World Values Survey (WVS) is a series of nationally representative surveys conducted in nearly 100 countries, covering almost 90 per cent of the world's population, using a common questionnaire on the attitudes of the world's population towards religion, politics, economics, society, education, prejudice, gender and sexuality, and the family. The WVS is the largest non-commercial, cross-national, time-series survey of human beliefs and values ever conducted, and currently includes interviews with nearly 400,000 respondents (Inglehart 2020).

According to the current documentation of the WVS (https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV7.jsp), the WVS currently captures the opinions of more than 5 billion global residents, or about 66 per cent of the world's population.

The current study uses the well-established methodology of analysing data from international surveys, again in the World Values Survey, as already presented in detail in the study by Tausch, Heshmati, and Karoui (2014). We would like to emphasise that, in addition to comparing percentages and means in cross-tabulations, the present study makes particular use of the method of partial correlations and promax factor analysis. As can be seen in Tausch Heshmati and Karoui (2014), promax factor analysis is particularly suitable for extracting dimensions of variables that may be correlated with each other from a dataset with many variables.

Our research attempt is, of course, guided by the vast traditions of mathematical-statistical analysis in opinion survey research (see Tausch, Heshmati, and Karoui 2014).

Our methodological approach is within a more general framework for studying global values with the methodology of comparative and opinion-survey based political science (Brenner 2016; Knippenberg 2015; Inglehart 2018, 2020). Our methodology for evaluating global public opinion from global surveys is also based on recent advances in mathematical statistical factor analysis (Basilevsky 2009; Hedges and Olkin 2014; Kline 2014; McDonald 2014; Mulaik 2009). Such studies allow projecting the underlying structures of the relationships between the variables.

Current methodology in the social sciences makes it clear that, in addition to factor analysis, other powerful tools of multivariate analysis are available to test complex relationships between an independent variable and dependent variables (Abdi 2003; Babones 2014; Basilevsky 2009; Clauß and Ebner 1970; Hedges and Olkin 2014; Kline 2014; Tabachnick and Fidell 2001; for a condensed survey, see also Tausch, Heshmati, and Karoui 2014). In our case, we used partial correlation analysis and factor analysis. For the algorithm of promax factor analysis, we refer our readers to IBM-SPSS (2014), Hendrickson and White (1964), and Morrison (1976).

4.2. Parametric indicators

Our support for non-violent democratic green movement indicator is a so-called ‘parametric indicator,’ which – in everyday language – combines the data with the aim of multivariate statistical analysis (see Tausch, Heshmati, and Karoui 2014). Such a parametric indicator relies on advanced statistical methods, such as principal components analysis (see, again, Tausch, Heshmati, & Karoui 2014). Such an analysis extracts an overriding indicator that mathematically best represents the component variables and their correlation matrix. Thus, our parametric index relies on the original survey respondents of the survey, and calculates the country scores, based on the principal component factor scores.

Our statistical calculations were performed by the routine and standard IBM-SPSS statistical program (IBM-SPSS XXVIII), and relied on standard partial correlation analyses, and factor analysis (Tausch, Heshmati, and Karoui 2014). Since both our data and the statistical methods used are available around the globe, any researcher can repeat our research using the available open data and should be able to reproduce the same results as we did.

4.3. Error margins

For the calculation of error margins of the representative opinion survey (see Tausch, Heshmati, and Karoui 2014), readers are also referred to the easily readable introduction to opinion survey error margins, prepared by Langer Research Associates n.d.² On the basis of the methodological literature on opinion surveys this website makes available a direct opinion survey error margin calculator. It is important to recall that, for example at a 5 % distrust rate in the environmental movement, error margins for a sample of around 1,000 representative interview partners for each country are ±1.4 %. For a 10-percent distrust rate, the error margin is ±1.9 %: and at a distrust rate of 15% the error margin is ±2.2 %; see Langer Research Associates n.d. That error margins differ according to reported rates of, say, distrust in the environmental movement, is an important fact of opinion survey research theory, often forgotten to be mentioned in the public debate.

Keeping in line with standard traditions of empirical opinion survey research (Tausch, Heshmati, and Karoui 2014), for all analysed groups and sub-groups, a minimum sample size of at least 30 respondents per country had to be available to be able to attempt reasonable predictions (Clauß and Ebner 1970).

Table 1

Maximum ranges of variation for survey results (the probability of error is 5 %)

4.4. Dimensions and variables from the World Values Survey and European Values Survey

For our multivariate model, we used the following World Values Survey Data:

·    No confidence: The Environmental Protection Movement

·    Active/Inactive membership: environmental organization

·    Justifiable: Violence against other people

·    Justifiable: Terrorism as a political, ideological or religious mean

·    Justifiable: Political violence

·    Democracy: Governments tax the rich and subsidize the poor

·    Democracy: Religious authorities interpret the laws

·    Democracy: People choose their leaders in free elections

·    Democracy: Civil rights protect people's liberty against oppression

5. Results from the World Values Survey

In what follows, we will try to present our findings as succinctly as possible. Table 2 clearly shows the rising tide of environmental movements in the Global South, directly contradicting many of the predictions of previous World Values Survey research. The top fifteen countries are Kenya, Indonesia, Colombia, Thailand, Guatemala, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Libya, Ethiopia, Mongolia, Morocco, Tajikistan, Nigeria, Switzerland and the United States. The fifteen countries with the lowest membership of ecological movements are Azerbaijan, Egypt, Belarus, Portugal, Slovakia, Estonia, Japan, Russia, Lithuania, Albania, Georgia, Poland, Italy, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Table 2

% of the population belong to ecological movements

Table 3 presents the results of our special analysis of the World Values Survey data: what is the percentage of members of ecological movements who say that political violence is never justified? The fifteen countries in which participants in ecological movements most strongly reject political violence are Armenia, Myanmar, Libya, Puerto Rico, Germany, Taiwan ROC, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Australia, Colombia, China, Nicaragua, Iran, Ethiopia and Indonesia.

The lowest rates of rejection of political violence among participants in ecological movements are found in Mongolia, Tajikistan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Canada, Thailand, Hong Kong SAR, the United States, Guatemala, Kenya, Mexico, Bolivia, New Zealand, Nigeria and Ecuador.

Table 3

% of the members of ecological movements saying political violence is never justified

Table 4 shows the percentage of members of ecological movements who say that terrorism is never justified. The lowest rates of acceptance of terrorism among members of ecological movements are found in Germany, Armenia, Australia, Libya, New Zealand, Taiwan ROC, Myanmar, Iran, Puerto Rico, Zimbabwe, China, Colombia and Ecuador. The most disappointing rates of rejection of terrorism among members of ecological movements are found in Mongolia, Tajikistan, the Philippines, Hong Kong SAR, Thailand, Guatemala, Mexico, Canada, Kenya, Nigeria, Bolivia, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia.

Table 4

% of the members of ecological movements saying terrorism is never justified

Next, we present the results of our Promax factor analysis. All statistical quality indicators, including the Bartlett test of sphericity, confirm the good and reliable statistical quality of our analysis, which explains 70 % of the total variance (Table 5). For the sake of simplicity, we rely mainly on the structure matrix of the promax factor analysis, wh ere all factors with an eigenvalue greater than 1.0 (see Table 6) are reported in Tab-
le 7 and the country factor scores in the Appendix Table.

Table 5

Indicators of statistical significance of the factor analytical model

Table 6

The Eigenvalues and explained variances

The structure matrix of the promax factor shows that the variables of our model, i.e.

– No confidence: The environmental movement

– Active/inactive membership: environmental organisation

– Justifiable: Violence against other people

– Justifiable: Terrorism as a political, ideological or religious tool

– Justifiable: Political violence

– Democracy: Governments tax the rich and subsidise the poor

– Democracy: Religious authorities interpret laws

– Democracy: People choose their leaders through free elections

– Democracy: Civil rights protect people's freedom from oppression

show very clear factor loadings >.500 on four factors, which together explain almost 70 % of the total variance of the variables in the model. We propose to interpret these factors as

– Terrorism and violence

– Civil rights and democracy movement

– Religious social justice movement

– Green movement

Support for terrorism and violence has a very clear negative component correlation with support for civil rights and democracy, and support for civil rights and democracy has a positive component correlation with support for the religious social justice movement (Table 8).

Table 7

Promax factor analysis of democracy and environmentalism

Table 8

Component correlations

As we have seen in Table 7, terrorism and violence are defined by the following factor loadings:

·    Justifiable: Terrorism as political, ideological or religious mean 0.883

·    Justifiable: Political violence 0.875

·    Justifiable: Violence against others 0.869

The best performers on the factor analytic dimension of terrorism and violence (lowest factor scores) are Egypt, Maldives, Germany, Andorra, Cyprus, Greece, Libya, Armenia, Japan and Jordan.

The Philippines, Mongolia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Kenya, Serbia, Morocco, Iraq, Macau SAR and Mexico score highest on the scale of support for terrorism and violence.

Support for civil rights and democracy is defined by the following factor loadings:

·    Democracy: People choose their leaders through free elections 0.826

·    Democracy: Civil rights protect people's freedom from oppression 0.826

·    Democracy: Governments tax the rich and subsidise the poor 0.499

The ten countries with the highest support for civil rights and democracy are Germany, Andorra, Bangladesh, Greece, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Armenia, Ethiopia, Canada and Taiwan ROC. The ten countries with the lowest levels of support for civil rights and democracy are Malaysia, Thailand, Mexico, Colombia, Mongolia, Guatemala, Kenya, Ecuador, Nicaragua and the Philippines.

The factor support for religious social justice movements is defined by the following factor loadings:

·    Democracy: Religious authorities interpret laws 0.868

·    Democracy: Governments tax the rich and subsidise the poor 0.685

The strongest support for religious social justice movements is found in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Tajikistan, Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Vietnam, Libya and Morocco. The least support for religious social justice movements is found in the Netherlands, New Zealand, Brazil, Australia, Germany, China, Japan, the United States, Thailand and Andorra.

Finally, the factor support for the green movement is defined by the factor loadings:

·    No trust: The environmental movement –0.775

·    Active/inactive membership: environmental organisation 0.722

The greatest support for green movements is found in Indonesia, Thailand, Kenya, the Philippines, Malaysia, Ethiopia, Puerto Rico, Iran, Tajikistan and Colombia. The least support for green movements can be found in Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Romania, Serbia, Tunisia, Greece, Jordan, Peru and Venezuela.

Our parametric index of non-violent democratic green movements is based on the following components and weights, derived from Table 6 (Eigenvalues)

·    Terrorism and violence –2.497

·    Civil rights and democracy movement 1.603

·    Religious social justice movement 1.134

·    Green movement 1.066

Our results suggest that overall support for non-violent democratic green movements is strongest in Germany, Andorra, Puerto Rico, Ethiopia, Greece, Taiwan ROC, New Zealand, the Netherlands, China, Armenia, Myanmar, Indonesia, Australia, Japan and Cyprus. Support for these movements is weakest in Malaysia, the Philippines, Mongolia, Mexico, Serbia, Kenya, Iraq, Venezuela, Vietnam, Guatemala, Thailand, Ecuador, Morocco, Lebanon and Macau SAR (Table 9).

Table 9

Parametric Index of the non-violent democratic green movements on a country basis

6. Perspectives and General Conclusions

Table 10 summarises the most salient and significant global economic and social factors that contribute to the strength of non-violent democratic green movements. The partial correlations are based on the data reported in (Tausch 2019, 2021) and the tables reported in this paper. Readers interested in conducting their own data analysis can perform such analyses with the data available in EXCEL format in Table 5 and Table 7 at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374631532_Homonegativity_28_09_2023_EXCEL_PUBLIC_ACCESS_Dat....

Table 10

World economic and world societal factors, contributing to the strength
of the non-violent democratic green movements

Our analysis has revealed the dramatic trend: Environmentalism is increasingly part of the political reality of the global South and East, especially in East and Southeast Asia. We have shown that in many countries and territories of the Global South, environmentalism is combined with non-violent and democratic movements. The best global performers on the factor analytic dimension of terrorism and violence (lowest factor scores) included Egypt, Maldives, Libya, Armenia, and Jordan.

Among the countries and territories with the highest support for civil rights and democracy are the global South and East countries and territories Bangladesh, Armenia, Ethiopia, and Taiwan ROC.

The greatest support for green movements is nowadays also found in the global South and East countries Indonesia, Thailand, Kenya, the Philippines, Malaysia, Ethiopia, Puerto Rico, Iran, Tajikistan and Colombia.

Our parametric index of non-violent democratic green movements suggests that overall support for non-violent democratic green movements is very strong in the global South and East countries and territories Puerto Rico, Ethiopia, Taiwan ROC, China, Armenia, Myanmar, and Indonesia.

NOTES

1 https://infobrics.org/news/brics-plus/.

2 https://www.langerresearch.com/moe/.

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APPENDIXES

Appendix 1

Country Factor Scores

Appendix 2

Choropleth Maps of the Country Factor Scores

Support for Terrorism and Violence

Support for Civil Rights and Democracy Movement

Support for Religious Justice Movements

Support for Green Movements

Strength of the support for non-violent democratic green movements (based on Table 9).