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Risk perceptions are important to the policy process because they inform individuals' preferences for government management of hazards that affect personal safety, public health, or ecological conditions. Studies of risk in the policy process have often focused on explicating the determinants of risk perceptions for highly salient, high consequence hazards (e.g., nuclear energy). We argue that it is useful to also study more routinely experienced hazards; doing so shows the relevance of risk perceptions in individuals' daily lives. Our investigation focuses on the impact perceived risk has on citizens' preferences over hazard management policies (as distinct from identifying risk perception determinants per se). We use a recursive structural equation model to analyze public opinion data measuring attitudes in three distinct issue domains: air pollution, crime, and hazardous waste storage and disposal. We find that citizens utilize perceived risk rationally: greater perceived risk generally produces support for more proactive government to manage potential hazards. This perceived risk-policy response relationship generally holds even though the policy options respondents were asked to consider entailed nontrivial costs to the public. The exception seems to be when individuals know less about the substantive issue domain.
KEY WORDS: Risk perception, hazards management, crime, air pollution, hazardous waste, policy preferences
Individuals' perceptions of risks are relevant to the policy process. The degree of risk individuals assign to activities (e.g., cigarette smoking) or technologies (e.g., genetic modification of foods) involving possible harm helps shape their attitudes toward public policy on such issues. Extensive literatures explain both the underlying causes of risk perception per se and the determinants of assigning risk to particular activities, situations, or technologies. But relatively few studies account for how those risk perceptions specifically influence preferences toward government policies designed to manage potential public health, personal safety, or ecological hazards.
In this article, we examine the role risk perceptions play in shaping citizens' policy preferences on three issues involving these very types of potential harms: air pollution, crime, and hazardous waste storage and disposal. We chose these issue areas for two key reasons. First, because these are relatively "routine" hazards it is likely that individuals have some degree of familiarity with the substantive character of each issue.1 This allows us to see how citizens utilize perceived risk in making...