Democracies are widely regarded to be good at keeping international promises and providing public goods. Yet this impression is shadowed by the apparent inability of democratic countries to respond to what has become the most pressing international environmental issue of all time - climate change. This paper conducts a large-n investigation of the World Resources Institute's climate data and Freedom House's freedom index to determine which, if either, of these perspectives most accurately represents the democracy effect on climate policy. Drawing on multilevel modelling, I build a three-level model of state compliance with the global climate regime; consisting of 3,081 observations spanning eight supranational regions and 147 countries from 1990 to 2012. The results of the empirical analyses suggest that even after controlling for economic development, participation in international environmental institutions, fossil fuel dependency, population and export diversification, increasing the level of democracy boosts compliance in 55 countries, but inhibits it in 92 others.
Building on these findings, the paper also explores the reasons behind these heterogeneous democracy effects, ultimately identifying two critical factors: First, increasing the opportunity to voice demands for environmental goods only promotes mitigation when it takes place in a mature democratic context. In authoritarian countries, democratization has the undesired effect of inhibiting compliance with emissions targets. Fossil fuels feature heavily in the economies of these latter states, which creates deeper structural barriers to mitigation. Second, democratization is much more likely promote effective climate policy when a country, or the policymakers who act on its behalf, believes in the ability of international institutions to reduce the disincentives against emissions reduction and perceives climate policy as a question of domestic costs and benefits rather than a zero-sum game against other states. A 'neo-liberal worldview' (in the IR sense of the term) makes countries more receptive to domestic demands for environmental goods, which are intensified under higher levels of democracy. Thus this paper takes issue with the one-size-fits-all approach to the democracy-effect on climate policy. Its main finding is that democratising reforms can promote effective responses to climate change, but in order for them to work, policymakers need to take into account the political and ideational context to which they are targeted.
