Environmental Policy Performance and Political Development: Do Democracies Outperform Authoritarian Regimes?

David S. Kelleher / Geum Soo Kim

The pursuit of sustainable development initially centered on understanding how economic development and environ-mental quality are related. More recently, many have focu-sed on how political development and environmental qua-lity are related. Researchers have examined a variety of environmental problems using a variety of political measu-res. While there is support for the idea that democracies out-perform more authoritarian regimes on various environmen-tal issues, the results are somewhat mixed and ambiguous, not least because the individual studies lack comparability and generalizability. To take stock and address this problem we use a comprehensive dataset of environmental perfor-mance outcomes and political variables to systematically address whether democracies do indeed outperform authori-tarian regimes across a range of environmental issues. Our results suggest that for environmental issues that are tied to human health, two governance indicators, “voice and ac-countability” and “control of corruption,” explain interna-tional variation in environmental health indicators indepen-dently of per capita income, which is also statistically sig-nificant. Turning to measures of ecosystem vitality, unlike environmental health indicators, ecosystem measures bear more disparate relations to economic and political measures. Thus, while support for “democratic environmentalism” may only be partial, support for “authoritarian environmen-talism” is non-existent.