“Comparing Ecological Sustainability in Autocracies and Democracies”, 2013-04-05 (; similar):
Considering the ecological sustainability performance of different political regimes, it seems questionable whether the assumption of the general superiority of democracy can be maintained in this policy field.
This paper compares the performance of democracies and autocracies (and their institutional subtypes) with regard to weak and strong ecological sustainability targets, on the one hand, while also analysing the impact of democracy and autocracy on different areas of ecological sustainability, on the other.
This will be verified by quantitative analysis to measure the influence of regime type on ecological sustainability performance, as opposed to the effect of other possible explanatory factors.
[Keywords: ecological sustainability, weak and strong sustainability, regime type, democracy and autocracy]
…The following section presents the concepts of ecological sustainability and eco-dictatorship. After discussing the effects of different regime types, taking into account different structural, institutional and actor-centred theoretical approaches (formulation of hypotheses) in §2, the dependent and independent variables for the empirical analysis are operationalised in §3. A 2-stage process is employed for the quantitative description and explanation of the performance results for more than 130 countries (all countries were considered, with the exception of the micro-states having fewer than 3 million inhabitants) for the period 1990–15200519ya. The following 2 sections compare the performances of different regime types (§4) and conduct a multivariate regression analysis in order to explore the effects of a variety of institutional, economic and social variables (§5). §6 of this article summarises the findings of the analysis.
…Conclusion: On examining the results of this theoretical and empirical investigation, we see that there is both good and bad news for advocates of democracy. The good news is that democracy has a clear advantage with regard to weak sustainability. The bad news is that this is not true for strong sustainability. These results correspond to the theoretical expectations formulated in hypotheses 1 and 2. Although both the theoretical analysis and empirical studies do not provide evidence for the superior problem-solving capability of autocracies for issues of ecological sustainability, the superiority of the democracies over the autocracies is limited to the solution of area-restricted environmental problems and those that are technically easy to solve. This implies that democracies adapt to, but do not really solve, major environmental problems.
…In addition to this finding, it has become clear that a dichotomous distinction between democracy and autocracy is not sufficient to explain the performance results. This can be demonstrated by large differences between regime subtypes; sometimes the variance within a regime type can be greater than that between regime types. The results deviate in their details from the theoretical expectations, as formulated in Hypothesis 3. Within the democratic spectrum, presidential regimes achieve, as expected, very good results, while the narrow winning coalition in monarchies seems to undermine their willingness to initiate changes necessary for strong sustainability. However military regimes, as predicted in the theory, lack the resources to achieve weak sustainability targets.