Environmental Attitudes and Household Electricity Use among Budapest Residents

Abstract

Abstract: This paper addresses the question of whether the evidence on positive relationship between environmental attitudes and household energy consumption in advanced post-industrial societies can be extended to emerging economies. In this study, we focused on electricity use and utilized multivariate regression to test the above hypothesis on a sample of residents of Óbuda (Budapest) in February 2011. The analysis suggests that the findings on the positive environmental attitude-behaviour relationship in advanced post-industrial societies can be extended to some (relatively affluent) communities in post-socialist societies. Our data also showed that the effects of housing type and demography are much larger compared to the effects of the attitudes. We emphasize that our findings do not provide evidence against the hypothesis on the interaction between the effects of societal culture and individual attitudes on pro-environmental behaviour.