How Local Perceptions Contribute to Urban Environmental Activism: Evidence from the Chicago Metropolitan Area

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we examine how structural and social-psychological factors combine to motivate urban environmental activism. Specifically, we argue that residents’ everyday perceptions about environmental, social, and political conditions in their neighborhoods and cities are connected to their likelihood of involvement in environmental collective action. We use logistic regression models and original survey data from the 2021 Cook County Community Survey (n = 1,069) to investigate whether urban residents’ perceptions of the conditions where they live are associated with their likelihood of participating in protests or public meetings around environmental issues. Our findings show that, in the context of the Chicago metropolitan area, residents who perceive worse environmental conditions in their communities, feel a greater sense of belonging to their neighborhoods, and feel they understand local politics and have political power are more likely to mobilize. In contrast, those who are pessimistic about the future of their neighborhoods are less likely to act. The study suggests that participation in urban environmental collective action is partly explained by how people interpret the daily surroundings they routinely navigate and experience where they live.KEYWORDS: Environmental activismlocal perceptionsneighborhoodsurban AcknowledgmentsWe would like to thank the Loyola University Chicago’s Department of Sociology for funding Juanita Vivas Bastidas’s research assistantship with Maria Akchurin, which supported our collaboration on this paper. Next, we would like to thank Keyla Navarrete, Sophia Bardelli, Gabrielle Castro, Miranda Hertzog, Andrew Byrne, and other members of the Cook County Community Survey team for their feedback and encouragement during the development of the survey’s environment block. We would also like to thank audience members from the Center for Urban Research and Learning (CURL), the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research (MAPOR), and the Midwest Sociological Society (MSS) for their comments and questions. Finally, we would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their time spent recommending helpful revisions to this manuscript. The Cook County Community Survey funding came from LUC Office of Research Services (ORS).Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Ethics DeclarationsThe Institutional Review Board at Loyola University Chicago approved the project (#3115).Supplementary dataSupplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2023.2250394.Notes1. A limitation of web-based surveys using quota sampling is that they may underrepresent respondents who are harder to reach or have a lower propensity to respond, such as older respondents, those without Internet access, and those who do not speak English.2. We ran our models with the complete dataset, including respondents who identified as non-binary and as Asian alone, more than one ethnoracial category, and not listed. Our findings regarding local perception variables did not change. We also ran the models using dummy variables for gender and ethnoracial groups. Our results did not change. See the Appendix.3. Because we use original measures to assess perceptions, we followed an item-specific questioning strategy associated with higher validity and reliability (Dykema et al. Citation2022).4. Although the questions in the environmental module refer to neighborhood-based perceptions, our survey question about participation does not allow us to disentangle whether a respondent taking part in a protest or public meeting did so about a geographically proximate environmental issue or not. Future studies can address this shortcoming by specifying the type and scale of the environmental issue people are mobilizing around or using ethnographic work to triangulate findings.5. No other pairwise differences were statistically significant (not shown).6. No other pairwise differences among ethnoracial and educational attainment groups were statistically significant (not shown).7. The pairwise difference between the 31 to 44 and the 45 to 64 age group was also statistically significant (not shown). The pairwise difference between being 45 to 64 and being 65+ was not statistically significant (not shown).Additional informationNotes on contributorsJuanita Vivas BastidasJuanita Vivas Bastidas is a Ph.D. student of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. Her work examines how people experience race/ethnicity, gender, nation, and citizenship in the contexts of migration, mental health, and environmental justice. She received her M.A. from Loyola University Chicago.Maria AkchurinMaria Akchurin is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. Her research examines how communities interpret and organize politically around global socio-environmental issues including water and sanitation infrastructure, resource extraction, and unequal exposures to environmental hazards. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.Dana GarbarskiDana Garbarski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Director of the University Core Curriculum at Loyola University Chicago. Her work examines and informs the valid and reliable collection of survey data on health and well-being, with an intersectional focus on dimensions of race/ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and sexuality. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.David DohertyDavid Doherty is a Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago. His research uses surveys and experimental methods to explore questions about mass and elite behavior and attitudes. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado.