Is Democracy Good for the Environment? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Regime Transitions

This paper tests the hypothesis that democratisation is conducive to less environmental depletion due to human activity. Using interrupted time series design for a panel of 47 transition countries and two indexes of pollution, CO emissions and PM10 concentrations, I find that democracies and dictatorships have two different targets of environmental quality, with those of democracies higher than those of dictatorships. Income inequality may as well alter this targets, but with opposite effects in the two different regimes.