1 Democracy, Autocracy, and Everything in Between: Understanding How Domestic Institutions Affect Environmental Protection 1. Introduction As the ecological challenges of the 21 st century broaden and intensify, which domestic institutions will best enable countries to take decisive environmental action? This question is all the more urgent in light of recent scientific assessments that climate change is already having serious impacts that will leave some populations with no choice but to adapt (IPCC 2014, 2018). As citizens become more alarmed by adverse climate events, worsening air quality, and other environmental problems, the argument goes, leaders who are held to account will respond in ecologically responsible ways (Looney 2016). This aligns comfortably with the view that ‘democracy 1 ’ is the best route to socially desirable policies (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005; Deacon 2009; Lake and Baum 2001). Others disagree sharply. Indeed, some now echo earlier arguments (e.g., Heilbroner 1974) that the gravity of many environmental problems requires the opposite of democracy. Democratic politics involves deliberation, which requires time we no longer have. Furthermore, it obliges leaders to be responsive to citizen demands that might undercut environmental objectives (Jamieson 2014). In contrast, when quick, decisive, and (possibly) unpopular action is needed, authoritarianism might be the best answer. Some look to China’s recent climate change policies – which involve top-down edicts, limited consultation 2 , and personal liberties restrictions that 1 I define this term and its counterpart, autocracy, later in the article. Note: I use the terms autocracy and authoritarian interchangeably throughout this article. 2 But see Moore 2014, discussed later, for interesting nuance.
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Democracy, Autocracy, and Everything in Between: Understanding How Domestic Institutions Affect Environmental Protection
1. Introduction
As the ecological challenges of the 21st century broaden and intensify, which domestic
institutions will best enable countries to take decisive environmental action? This question is all
the more urgent in light of recent scientific assessments that climate change is already having
serious impacts that will leave some populations with no choice but to adapt (IPCC 2014, 2018).
As citizens become more alarmed by adverse climate events, worsening air quality, and other
environmental problems, the argument goes, leaders who are held to account will respond in
ecologically responsible ways (Looney 2016). This aligns comfortably with the view that
‘democracy1’ is the best route to socially desirable policies (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005;
Deacon 2009; Lake and Baum 2001).
Others disagree sharply. Indeed, some now echo earlier arguments (e.g., Heilbroner 1974) that
the gravity of many environmental problems requires the opposite of democracy. Democratic
politics involves deliberation, which requires time we no longer have. Furthermore, it obliges
leaders to be responsive to citizen demands that might undercut environmental objectives
(Jamieson 2014). In contrast, when quick, decisive, and (possibly) unpopular action is needed,
authoritarianism might be the best answer. Some look to China’s recent climate change policies
– which involve top-down edicts, limited consultation2, and personal liberties restrictions that
1 I define this term and its counterpart, autocracy, later in the article. Note: I use the terms autocracy and
authoritarian interchangeably throughout this article.
2 But see Moore 2014, discussed later, for interesting nuance.
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Westerners would find unacceptable – and conclude that ‘authoritarian environmentalism’ might
provide a more viable way forward (Beeson 2010; Gilley 2012).
These debates extend well beyond the walls of academia. The idea that citizen involvement
and accountable domestic institutions are crucial to sustainability is enshrined in the 1992 Rio
Declaration, which states, “environmental issues are best handled with the participation of all
concerned citizens,” who should have easy access to information, the opportunity to participate
in decision-making, and effective access to courts and redress/remedy if needed (UNEP 1992,
principle 10; see also Looney 2016). Others place far less faith in democratic institutions. For
instance, scientist-turned-activist James Lovelock laments the environmental impacts of “a sort
of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say.” We may, he says, have to “put
democracy on hold for a while,” instead adopting a system in which a few trusted authorities
make eco-decisions (Lovelock 2010).
Is there a ‘democratic advantage’ when it comes to environmental protection, or do
autocracies win out? Existing answers to this question have been mixed, for two main reasons.
First, as is common among scholars and in public discourse more broadly, the term democracy
often means different things to different people. Second, quantitatively-oriented studies have
typically relied on measures that are too general to gauge the specific mechanism, and/or do not
control for competing institutional explanations. The result is that we are not really certain
whether democracy ‘matters’; nor are we sure specifically why or how.
This article overcomes these limitations in two chief ways. First, it unpacks the main
mechanisms behind the idea that democracy affects environmental outcomes – engaging with
examples from around the world (not just the entrenched democracies) and exploring nuance
and, at times, indeterminacy, in theoretical expectations. More specifically, I explore three causal
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stories that underpin most research on democracy and environmentalism: (1) electoral
accountability incentivizes leaders to provide better eco-outcomes for their citizens; (2)
protection of civil liberties and civil society helps to ensure environmental awareness and
learning, as well as successful environmental activism; and (3) political constraints provide a
check on majority will and limit individual government actors’ ability to unilaterally define
environmental policy. Each is a distinct causal story, and as I explain in greater detail in the
article, each has important caveats that are crucial to understanding debates about democracy and
the environment.
The second main contribution of this article is empirical: having articulated the three causal
mechanisms (and counter-arguments), I put these ideas to the test, recent data from around the
world. I focus on a wide range of problematic environmental practices: emissions of harmful
gases, energy consumption, and conservation failures. While by no means an exhaustive list,
these collectively account for a huge portion of human damage to the global ecosystem. Three
main findings emerge. First, electoral accountability is linked to significantly inferior
environmental outcomes much of the time, but it improves countries’ conservation efforts and
has mixed impacts on greenhouse gas emissions. Second, robust civil society protections have
substantially beneficial impacts on a wide variety of environmental practices. Third, political
constraints do not reliably affect eco-outcomes. Overall, these findings indicate that encouraging
and protecting civil society, not promoting electoral accountability or an eco-authoritarian model
of limited political constraints, is the key to better environmental outcomes.
This article proceeds as follows. In the following section, I provide an overview of the
existing literature on domestic politics and environmental outcomes. Section 3 focuses on theory,
unpacking the three main causal mechanisms outlined above and discussing caveats; section 4
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explores the considerable extent to which these vary within the autocratic world. Section 5
focuses chiefly on measurement, from two main angles: tying in the theories to data that can
properly test them, and focusing on a range of practices that account for a large portion of human
harm to the environment. Section 6 describes the modeling technique – joining other recent work
in embracing the use of hierarchical modeling in the cross-national study of environmental
politics – and presents the findings. Finally, section 7 presents conclusions.
2. Democratic Politics, Autocratic Politics, and Environmental Protection: What Do We
Know?
Empirical research on democratic/autocratic politics and environmental protection can be
grouped in three broad categories. A first and now well-developed strand, is chiefly interested in
comparing democracies with autocracies.3 The starting point for much of this work is the well-
known proposition that democracies are better than autocracies at providing public goods (c.f.,
Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003; Lake and Baum 2001). Applying that logic to the eco-arena,
many studies find strong evidence that democracies outperform autocracies, across a range of
environmental challenges: air pollutants like sulfur dioxide (SO2) (Barrett and Graddy 2000;
Bernauer and Koubi 2009); clean water (Deacon 2009; Li and Reuveny 2006); public sanitation
(Deacon 2009); renewable energy measures (Bayer and Urpelainen 2016), lead in gasoline
(Fredriksson et al. 2005); carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen oxide (NOX), forest protection, land
degradation (Li and Reuveny 2006), and various other environmental measures.
Qualifications to these findings are plentiful. While often supportive of eco policies such as
treaty participation and ‘weak’ sustainability measures (Wurster 2013), democracies do not
necessarily achieve superior environmental outcomes (Bättig and Bernauer 2009; Midlarsky
3 The definition and measurement of these terms are crucial. I discuss these in the next section.
Findings significant at p < .05 appear in bold. See Table 1a (Appendix) for greater detail on variables. Countries of interest have a Core Civil Society value in the bottom tercile and a Political Constraints value in the bottom tercile. For Political Constraints, this value is 0. *YEAR between-group variance not included in this model because the estimated variance-covariance matrices are of less than full rank. ICC = intra-class-correlation.
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Population Density
Trade Dependence
GDP per Capita sq
GDP per Capita
Free/Fair Elections
−0.50 −0.25 0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75Coefficient
Greenhouse Gas Emissions
−1.0 −0.5 0.0 0.5Coefficient
Sulfur Dioxide Emissions
−0.4 −0.2 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6Coefficient
Nitrogen Oxide Emissions
Population Density
Trade Dependence
GDP per Capita sq
GDP per Capita
Free/Fair Elections
−0.8 −0.4 0.0 0.4Coefficient
Energy Use
−0.25 0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75Coefficient
Use of Non−Renewable Energy
−3 −2 −1 0 1Coefficient
Land Non−Protection
Figure 2. Coefficient Plots from Table 2: Political Institutions and Environmental Degradation: Countries With Minimal Civil Society and No Political Constraints
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Turning to Table 3 and Figure 3, the results confirm the that civil society is linked to more
sustainable environmental practices, across all environmental outcomes (except – again – land
non-protection). Here, consider two countries with similarly-low electoral competition and
political constraints, but substantially different (1 standard-deviation around the mean) civil
society protections: Kenya in 1991 and Nigeria around the same time. They had Core Civil
Society values ~.42 and ~.72, respectively. Holding all other factors at their means, such a surge
in civil society protection is linked to .54% lower greenhouse gas emissions, 2.3% lower SO2
emissions, 1.2% lower NOX emissions, 2.2% lower energy consumption, and 1.3% lower non-
renewables use. Finally, Table 4 and Figure 4 show that political constraints have minimal
impacts on environmental outcomes, the only exception being non-renewable use. Given the
generally null results, I do not provide a two-country comparison here.
While my main interest in using mixed effects is to control for sources of heterogeneity in the
data, it is also useful to explore some of the other model parameters. σ2 is simply the (residual)
variance of the fixed portion of the model (discussed earlier in the article). The intra-class
correlation (ICC) is of particular interest: it indicates how much of the overall model variance is
explained by the model’s grouping structure. In all models, the ICC is very large, specifically for
country and region. This provides additional support for the idea that employing a complex
hierarchical error structure is sensible. (For year, the ICC is much smaller and in some cases
minute, but the tests discussed earlier in the article confirm that they do ‘belong’ in each model
except for non-renewable use in certain models). Finally, comparison of the two sub-models’ R2s
is insightful. The fixed part of the models provides an important contribution to overall model fit,
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Table 3. Political Institutions and Environmental Degradation: Mixed Effects Model, Countries With Minimally Free/Fair Elections and No Political Constraints
Findings significant at p < .05 appear in bold. See Table 1a (Appendix) for greater detail on variables. Countries of interest have a free/fair elections value in the bottom tercile and a political constraints value in the bottom tercile. For Political constraints, this value is 0. *Year between-group variance not included in this model because the estimated variance-covariance matrices are of less than full rank. ICC = intra-class-correlation.
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Population Density
Trade Dependence
GDP per Capita sq
GDP per Capita
Core Civil Society
−0.3 0.0 0.3 0.6Coefficient
Greenhouse Gas Emissions
−0.5 0.0Coefficient
Sulfur Dioxide Emissions
−0.50 −0.25 0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75Coefficient
Nitrogen Oxide Emissions
Population Density
Trade Dependence
GDP per Capita sq
GDP per Capita
Core Civil Society
−0.75 −0.50 −0.25 0.00 0.25Coefficient
Energy Use
−0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5Coefficient
Use of Non−Renewable Energy
−0.8 −0.4 0.0 0.4 0.8Coefficient
Land Non−Protection
Figure 3. Coefficient Plots from Table 3: Political Institutions and Environmental Degradation: Countries With Minimally Free/Fair Elections and No Political Constraints
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Table 4. Political Institutions and Environmental Degradation: Mixed Effects Model, Countries With Minimal Civil Society and Minimally Free/Fair Elections
Findings significant at p < .05 appear in bold. See Table 1a for greater detail on variables. Countries of interest have a free/fair elections value in the bottom tercile and a core civil society value in the bottom tercile. *Year between-group variance not included in this model because the estimated variance-covariance matrices are of less than full rank. Coefficient plots available upon request. ICC = intra-class-correlation.
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Population Density
Trade Dependence
GDP per Capita sq
GDP per Capita
Political Constraints
−0.50 −0.25 0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75Coefficient
Greenhouse Gas Emissions
−1.0 −0.5 0.0 0.5Coefficient
Sulfur Dioxide Emissions
−0.5 0.0 0.5Coefficient
Nitrogen Oxide Emissions
Population Density
Trade Dependence
GDP per Capita sq
GDP per Capita
Political Constraints
−0.8 −0.4 0.0 0.4Coefficient
Energy Use
−0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0Coefficient
Use of Non−Renewable Energy
−3 −2 −1 0 1Coefficient
Land Non−Protection
Figure 4. Coefficient Plots from Table 4: Political Institutions and Environmental Degradation: Countries With Minimally Free/Fair Elections and Minimal Civil Society
depending on the environmental outcome (e.g., land non-protection consistently has poor model
fit, whereas most other outcomes have respectable if imperfect R2s). But overall, it is clear that
the random portion of the model is doing much of the explanatory work, consistent with other
environmental politics studies using this method (Povitkina 2018). This is neither a good nor a
bad thing – it simply tells us that, for these data, much of the explanatory power is in the model’s
complex, hierarchical, error structure.
Turning briefly to the control variables, there is strong, generally consistent evidence of an
environmental Kuznets curve: wealth initially leads to an increase in environmental harm, but
eventually fosters more responsible behavior. Countries that trade more consistently have poorer
environmental practices, consistent with Bayer and Urpelainen’s (2016) findings as well as some
others (e.g., Li and Reuveny 2006).21 More densely-populated countries have lower greenhouse
gas and NOx emissions, which is sensible to the extent that these areas rely more heavily on
public transportation rather than cars (Li and Reuveny 2006). Conversely, these areas have
higher SO2 emissions, consume more energy, and depend more extensively on non-renewables.
This variability in findings is present in other studies that explore the impact of population
density on environmental outcomes as well (c.f., Li and Reuveny 2006; Povitkina 2018; Wurster
2013).
I conduct three main robustness checks. First, I consider alternate operationalizations of two
of the main independent variables of interest.22 For an alternative gauge of electoral
21 Some studies find no impact of trade on environmental practices, or even a positive relationship (c.f.,
Bernauer and Koubi 2009). Differences likely owe to the inclusion of more recent data in the present
study, and/or different approaches to operationalizing variables.
22 No viable alternative is available for Political Constraints.
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accountability, I use Coppedge et al.’s (2018a: 39) Electoral Democracy Index. For an alternate
operationalization of the civil society mechanism, I employ Coppedge et al.’s (2018a: 47) Civil
Society Participation Index. As Table 4a (Appendix) demonstrates, the results using these
alternate measures are highly similar to those in Table 1. Second, I add more independent
variables to the models: latitude, year (and, in additional analyses, year + year2 to gauge non-
linear time trends), industry as a percentage of GDP, and GDP growth.23 The results are highly
similar to those reported in this article; in no case do the findings differ notably. Third, I explore
an alternative modeling approach. Arguably the most common alternative in the environmental
politics literature is country-specific (and, possibly year-specific) intercepts, also known as fixed
effects. Tables 5a-8a (Appendix) demonstrate that the results are highly similar using that
approach.
7. Conclusion
Is democracy a boon or a bane for the environment? Public goods theories have long held that
electoral accountability is the key to a better environment, and the evidence confirms this to be
the case for land conservation programs. But the record is more problematic for a host of other
environmental outcomes. Elections have an indeterminate impact on greenhouse gas emissions,
and there is ample evidence – controlling for other factors such as civil society and political
constraints – that countries with free/fair elections behave less responsibly, pumping more SO2
and NOx into the atmosphere, consuming more energy, and relying more heavily on non-
renewables. Elections, then, are no panacea for the environment. A simple but plausible
23 See Table 1a (Appendix) for information on measurement and sources. The results are available upon
request, and could be added to the Appendix.
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explanation is that if citizens prioritize goals that involve eco-unfriendly behaviors,
democratically-elected leaders face stronger incentives to pursue those objectives.
In contrast, the results of this article strongly indicate that civil society is the more reliable
route to better environmental practices. Indeed, I find that a robust civil society reduces
emissions of various harmful gases – including, perhaps most notably – those that contribute to
climate change, and also steers countries toward lower, and more sustainable, energy
consumption. ‘Democracies,’ then, may have an environmental advantage because of how their
civil societies, rather than their elections, operate.
What, then, of eco-authoritarianism? While there can be little doubt that China’s top-down
model has yielded some environmental successes, a broader analysis lends virtually no support to
this as a template for the world. Egypt and Morocco’s experiences demonstrate that limited
political constraints put the ecosystem at the mercy of one or a handful of leaders, who may or
may not place priority on environmental protection. More generally, cross-national data simply
do not support the contention that fewer political constraints are better for the environment. Eco-
authoritarianism, simply put, is not the answer.
This article has focused on the link between domestic institutions and various types of
environmental harm. This is a standard approach, based on the premise that mitigation –
reducing harmful activities and developing alternatives – is the linchpin of good environmental
policy. While mitigation remains crucial, adaptation is a pressing reality, particularly in the
climate change arena. Adaptation involves a wide variety of activities, including infrastructure
development to cope with sea-level rise and extreme weather, responding to biodiversity
endangerment and loss, and reducing impacts on sources of food and livelihood (IPCC 2014).
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Which domestic institutions will be most adept at responding to these challenges? This is a
fundamental question that should interest scholars and policymakers alike.
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Appendix 1
APPENDIX
Table 1a. Data Sources and Measurement Variable Measurement Transformation Source Free/Fair Election
Findings significant at p < .05 appear in bold. See Table 1a (Appendix) for greater detail on variables. Electoral democracy and civil society participation are alternative operationalizations to those used in Table 1. Coefficient plots available upon request. ICC = intra-class-correlation.
Appendix 6
Table 5a. Political Institutions and Environmental Degradation: Fixed Effects Model
Findings significant at p < .05 appear in bold. See Table 1a (Appendix) for greater detail on variables. Countries of interest have a free/fair elections value in the bottom tercile and a political constraints value in the bottom tercile. For political constraints, this value is 0.
Appendix 8
Table 7a. Political Institutions and Environmental Degradation: Fixed Effects Model, Countries With Minimal Civil Society and No Political Constraints
Findings significant at p < .05 appear in bold. See Table 1a for greater detail on variables. Countries of interest have a core civil society value in the bottom tercile and a political constraints value in the bottom tercile. For political Constraints, this value is 0. Coefficient plots available upon request.
Appendix 9
Table 8a. Political Institutions and Environmental Degradation: Fixed Effects Model, Countries With Minimal Civil Society and Minimally Free/Fair Elections
Findings significant at p < .05 appear in bold. See Table 1a for greater detail on variables. Countries of interest have a core civil society value in the bottom tercile and a free/fair elections value in the bottom tercile.