How Green is Democracy: Are There Any Democratic Advantages in Climate Change Mitigation?

Despite various studies on the effect of political regimes on climate change, the relationships remain unclear and often contradictory. Previous empirical studies show that regime variations matter both in positive and negative ways even some studies suggesting the conditional effect of regime typologies for climate change mitigation. The study examines the relationships between political regimes and climate change as a way of robustness check of the existing empirical findings at a cross-national perspective. The study employs multiple quantitative measures of democracy and multiple estimation strategies to test if the results are consistent across various measures. Using the World Bank data and five different democracy indices, the study estimates the effect of political regimes on the per capita CO2 emissions. The study finds a trivial to moderate relationship between democracy and per capita CO2 emissions which are consistent across various democracy indices and empirical techniques. The results are not as ambitious as many previous studies suggested which seem to have some practical significance. The study concludes that in a typical democracy set-up which is a complex system, both positive and negative forces drive for and against climate change mitigation efforts culminating in a trivial to moderate effect for democratic political regimes in climate change mitigation.