Environmental Attitudes before and after Fukushima

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster revealed the dangers of nuclear power and might have changed people's attitudes towards this energy source. Therefore this paper examines whether a nuclear accident like the Fukushima accident has a long-term effect on attitudes towards nuclear energy. After we describe the overall impact and trend before and after the accident for different countries we test hypotheses about the structure of the effect. On the one hand, whether the effect is temporary or persistent; on the other, whether the average treatment effect depends on individual characteristics, like age, gender, education or nationality. According to availability heuristics (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974) we would assume a temporary effect (declining media coverage, memories fading away), classical rational choice theory (Coleman, 1990) might expect a long-term effect which is caused by an updated risk evaluation due to new information we got from the Fukushima accident (e.g. how tedious it is to stop nuclear chain-reaction or a lack of trust in authorities because of bad disaster management). Using data from the latest ISSP 2010/2011 environmental module III we design our study as a natural experiment as we have both people surveyed before and after the accident. Within the causal framework of a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) and a Difference-in-Difference Estimator (DiD) we assume heterogenous  treatment effects so that some individuals change their attitudes more drastically than others. Our results indicate that young people are more likely to be influenced by the accident while gender does not matter. Moreover we find different patterns between countries that need further research.