Does democratic backsliding undermine climate policy? No evidence (yet)

Countries with liberal democratic institutions tend to have stricter climate policies and have made more progress in reducing emissions than autocracies. Does this, in turn, mean that democratic backsliding or autocratization, a widely observed trend in the global system in recent years, has a generally negative effect on climate change mitigation efforts? Using the best available data and various estimation strategies for causal inference, we cannot find systematic evidence for this widely held presumption. This finding seems encouraging, but it remains open whether current climate policy reversals, e.g., in the US, could bring about a more general trend where democratic backsliding will undermine climate policy worldwide.