Democratic institutions versus autocratic regimes: The case of environmental policy

Abstract

The literature suggests that democracy positively affects environmental policy stringency. Using the method of propensity score matching, we find that this result appears to be largely driven by the parliamentary democracies (as opposed to the presidential-congressional, proportional or majority systems). Moreover, it appears that presidential-congressional systems often set environmental policies not significantly different from autocracies. These are novel contributions to the literature. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007Political institutions, Democracy, Environmental policy, Propensity score matching,

Voting for the environment : the importance of Democracy and education in Latin america

“…This study claims that democracy has a positive effect on environmental quality in Latin America, although previous papers find a positive (Farzin and Bond, 2006;Fredriksson and Wollscheid, 2007), ambiguous (Buitenzorgy and Mol, 2011;You et al, 2015) or negative relationship (Midlarsky, 1998;Halkos and Tzeremes, 2013) between democracy and environmental quality.…”

La política ambiental en América Latina y el Caribe

“…Por otro lado, Neumayer (2002), con cuatro medidas diferentes para la variable democracia, índice de derechos civiles y políticos basado en los datos de Freedom House, índice del proyecto Polity, índice de democracia de Vanhanen, y un indicador de gobernancia del Banco Mundial), encuentra una relación positiva significativa entre democracia y compromiso ambiental (medido por la firma de tratados ambientales), pero mucho más débil entre democracia y resultado ambiental (medido en términos de calidad de ambiente). Por su parte, en Fredriksson y Wollscheid (2007), la relación positiva entre democracia y ambiente aparece primariamente determinada por las democracias parlamentarias. Esto es, los sistemas de gobierno como el presidencialismo deciden políticas ambientales no muy diferentes que las autocracias, y peores que las democracias parlamentarias.…”

Group Inequality and Environmental Sustainability: Insights from Bangladesh and Kenyan Forest Commons

“…The environmental performance indicators that these studies explored are varied and often included, atmospheric and other pollutants pertaining to water and sanitation [5,7,8]; government commitments to different environmental treaties [9]; and a combination of indicators in the form of Environmental Sustainability Index [10][11][12]. A few studies also included impacts of democracy, and influence of "world polity" such as international NGOs or inter-governmental organisations on forestation and land degradation [5,[12][13][14][15].…”

“…Varied were also the indicators studies used to represent democratic status of a regime. They included large data sets on freedom in a country [5]; nature of civil and political freedom, and green or left party strength [7,17]; presence of environmental lobby and democratic participation [18]; forms of electoral system, i.e., parliamentary or presidential, majoritarian or proportional [11]; and level of democratization and federalism [16]. Given the wide range of variations in definitions, indicators, data sets, time period considered, and scale of governance at which the analyses were carried out, it is difficult to compare the studies.…”