Replication Data for: Can Autocracy Handle Climate Change?

Existing literature on climate politics predominantly concentrates on democracies, yet there is a pressing need to examine how authoritarian regimes respond to climate change, given their growing impact on global carbon emissions and their populations’ acute climate vulnerability. Extant works often assume that authoritarian regimes have inherent advantages in addressing climate change, leading to overly optimistic perspectives on their capabilities. This article highlights the necessity of qualifying those assumptions and evaluates the comparative advantages or disadvantages of autocracies relative to democracies throughout the policy process: policy formulation (or outputs), implementation, and outcomes. It argues that while climate-conscious autocracies may efficiently produce policy outputs based on scientific evidence, they often face more challenges related to information about local enforcement during implementation, which may result in greater hurdles than democracies, even with adequate state capacity and monitoring infrastructure. Furthermore, this analysis contends that a country’s developmental stage, rather than its regime type, is more directly related to the effectiveness of translating implementation efforts into tangible policy outcomes. Therefore, this article posits that the political science discourse, which often juxtaposes democracies with autocracies, should expand its scope to better understand how a country’s developmental level influences the success of its climate strategies.