Environmental commitments in different types of democracies: The role of liberal, social-liberal, and deliberative politics

Abstract

Since a more substantial recognition of environmental degradation in the 1960s, the scholarly community has looked at democracy with mixed feelings. Some assert that democracy is devastating for the environmental performance, some claim the opposite, while others suggest that certain democratic models are more successful than others in paving the way for sustainability. Both political theorists and empirical scholars add fuel to this debate, and neither has settled the argument yet. In this paper we make use of recently collected data from the Varieties of Democracy project on different conceptions of democracy and address both these literatures. We empirically test whether different features of democracies, i.e., liberal in its thinner understanding, social-liberal, and deliberative, are more or less beneficial for environmental commitments. We investigate which of these features make democracies more prone to produce environmental policy outputs – adopt climate laws, deliver on them, develop stringent environmental policies, and incorporate sustainability into economic policies. We find that democracies with stronger deliberative features adopt more, but not necessarily stricter or more effective, environmental policies. Instead, democracies with stronger social-liberal features adopt both stricter and more effective policies.