Property Rights & Attitudes Toward Environmental Regulation: an Empirical Investigation
Abstract: Environmental regulation often involves the need to impose limitations on the ways in which individuals can use their property. The paper generates empirical evidence on the role the strength of formal legal protection for property rights plays in influencing individuals attitudes toward such regulation. A survey vignette is administered to Canadian and US respondents, to exploit the underlying difference in the constitutional status of property rights between Canada and the US. While government faces constitutional limits on its ability to take property in the US, in Canada such a constitutional right was deliberately excluded from the Charter. Participants are asked to provide financial (scaled categories) and attitudinal responses (7 point scale) to a vignette that proposes development restrictions on a coastal property. Results are analyzed using ordered logit regressions and equivalence of means tests. The survey is structured to allow analysis of the results controlling for individuals’ prior legal beliefs, as well as differences in the formal legal status of property rights. The durability of individuals’ beliefs is assessed by giving “correct” information about the law, then soliciting further responses. The results indicate that there is no independent significance associated with the difference in the formal legal status of property rights between Canada and the US. However, there is significant variation in the individual attitudes and financial demands of respondents in both the Canadian and US samples. While legal beliefs appear to be a significant explanatory variable, these beliefs do not appear to remain significant once individuals receive “correct” information about the law.
