The pursuit of sustainable development initially centered on understanding how economic development and environmental quality are related. More recently, many have focused on how political development and environmental quality are related. Researchers have examined a variety of environmental problems using a variety of political measures. While there is support for the idea that democracies outperform more authoritarian regimes on various environmental issues, the results are somewhat mixed and ambiguous, not least because the individual studies lack comparability and generalizability. To take stock and address this problem we use a comprehensive dataset of environmental performance outcomes and political variables to systematically address whether democracies do indeed outperform authoritarian regimes across a range of environmental issues. Our results suggest that for environmental issues that are tied to human health, two governance indicators, “voice and accountability” and “control of corruption,” explain international variation in environmental health indicators independently of per capita income, which is also statistically significant. Turning to measures of ecosystem vitality, unlike environmental health indicators, ecosystem measures bear more disparate relations to economic and political measures. Thus, while support for “democratic environmentalism” may only be partial, support for “authoritarian environmentalism” is non-existent.
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