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This paper identifies a new source that explains environmental behaviour: the presence of future tense marking in language. We predict that languages that grammatically mark the future affect speakers' intertemporal preferences and thereby reduce their willingness to address environmental problems. We first show that speakers of languages with future tense marking are less likely to adopt environmentally responsible behaviours and to support policies to prevent environmental damage. We then document that this effect holds across countries: future tense marking is an important determinant of climate change policies and global environmental cooperation. The results suggest that there may be deep and surprising obstacles for attempts to address climate change.

While it is obvious that the level of democracy will affect the quality of governance, we show that an electoral democracy should not be expected to have an improved level of governance when compared with an outright authoritarian regime. We use the term 'electoral democracy' to refer to where relatively free and fair elections are held (where opposition parties stand some chance of winning government) but the institutions of a liberal society (like freedom of the press) are not in place. Given this, we consider what level of democracy is necessary before we can expect it to have a positive effect upon governance. We employ a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to construct a new governance indicator. Using the data from over one hundred countries and advanced panel data analysis for the period 1996-2012, our results confirm that political freedom and civil rights influence the level of governance, but this effect is found to be nonlinear. Governance is typically higher in dictatorships than in countries that are partially democratized (electoral democracies). However, once past a threshold, democratic practices assist good governance. Furthermore, it is found that democracy substantially strengthens levels of governance only within the top-half of the conditional distribution.

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