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Abstract
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.
Notes
While Bernauer and Koubi (Citation2009) and Kneuer (Citation2012) find a positive effect of democracy in terms of air quality and pollution control, Midlarsky (Citation1998) reports that democracies are associated with worse environmental performance than autocracies. Ward (Citation2006) finds that the impact of democracy on a variety of ecological sustainability indicators is rather mixed.
Winston Churchill described democracy in 1947 as follows: ‘No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’ (Churchill Citation1974, p. 7566).
Under certain circumstances, a high number of veto players can also exist in an autocratic system. How influential they actually are, is hard to determine, though, due to the non-transparency of decision-making processes.
The degree of repression can vary considerably from one authoritarian regime to the other. In the following, it is assumed that military regimes, in particular, use these means.
The extent to which a democracy has advantages with regard to strong sustainability depends, however, on the degree to which long-term, cumulative environmental problems are considered in democratic competitions.
While democracies usually provide a long-term stable institutional framework, political processes taking place within this framework tend to be aligned to a short time horizon.
This assumes, however, that environmental protection is demanded as an important task, at least by an important part of the democratic electorate.
So ‘viewed from a rational choice perspective, authoritarian rulers do not have incentives to adopt, or to stick with, sustainable policies. They prioritise rapid economic development to gain legitimacy and to bolster external security’ (Porritt Citation1984, p. 48, Ward Citation2008, p. 387).
Strong sustainability measures ‘are designed to predominantly generate costs while adaptation policies may also generate potential benefits’ for today's society and economy (jobs in the environmental sector, construction of infrastructure projects, etc.; Fliegauf and Sanga Citation2010, p. 6).
Owing to data constraints, records for data series reaching farther back are not available. A specific feature of the performance measurements made here is the use of policy outcome indicators. As a result, material results in a policy area can be recorded. Outcome indicators reflect the performance level in a policy area in relation to the objectives pursued (Roller Citation2011). This is a common method for measuring sustainable development (George and Kirkpatrick Citation2007, Strange and Bayley Citation2009). When comparing democracies with autocracies, we face however a twofold data problem. First, data access is much more difficult in the case of autocracies than of democracies (selection bias). Second, there is a risk that existing data are systematically falsified in autocracies (see Roller 2013). Even if generally accepted data sources (World Bank, UNSD) are evaluated, these issues must be considered in the interpretation. To increase the robustness of the performance measurement, indicators were chosen where autocratic states had little influence on information collection (there was a high level of international control). On the other hand, three independent indicators were considered for each dimension of sustainability.
The extent to which a close causal connection exists between the economic development of a country and its degree of democratisation is still a controversial issue. Because the effects of regime type might be ‘confounded when wealth is not controlled’ (Ward Citation2008, p. 392), the factor of economic development has to be considered.
One exception here is only the indicator of energy consumption. Parliamentary democracies perform slightly better than semi-presidential ones at weak sustainability, but not at strong sustainability.
The performance ranking for single countries shows that rich democracies (e.g. Switzerland, Sweden, Norway and Germany) remain at the top of the lists of weak sustainability indicators. Important autocratic states like China or Russia can be found in the lower percentiles of the country rankings. At the end of the lists there are only underdeveloped, war-stricken autocracies like Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Somalia. While only economically less developed countries perform well with regard to strong sustainability performance, we have two groups at the other, that is to say inferior, end of the lists: on the one hand, industrialised democracies (USA, Norway, Finland and Canada) and on the other hand, oil-rich autocracies (Saudi Arabia and Russia).
Whereas the ‘Degree of Decentralisation’ does not reach a significant level of explanation in any one of the models, contrary to theoretical expectations, the factor ‘Checks and Balances’ is significantly coupled with high energy consumption.
A country's heavy resource dependency, on the other hand, is also associated with high waste production.