Democracy and the Environment

We survey research on the relationship between democracy and the environment. The first part of our review examines how democratic systems influence environmental outcomes. Scholars have found, at best, a weakly positive correlation between democracy and environment, with little support for the proposed democratic environmental Kuznets curve, a finding we confirm with new data. We argue that democracy is too coarse a category to capture variation in environmental outcomes. Therefore, the second part of the review surveys how specific institutional features structure principal–agent relationships between citizens, leaders, and organized groups. We show that effective environmental governance depends on institutions that align incentives, reduce informational asymmetries, and match temporal horizons. These can arise in democracies but can also, under certain conditions, appear in autocratic contexts such as China, where state capacity and political incentives have aligned to produce targeted improvements. We conclude by identifying key open questions and promising directions for future research.