Clientelism and Democracy A Cross-National Analysis

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are rapidly increasing across the world. While national governments are usually seen as having the power, authority, and ability to make significant reductions in their CO2 outputs, cross-national research rarely focuses on the institutional structures of states that moderate their CO2 emissions. Previous research that focuses on internal state factors largely focus on democracy and find wildly conflicting results. This research argues that clientelism is a missing piece of the puzzle in explaining how democracy impacts CO2 emissions. Building on the extant contradictory research, the present study uses two-way fixed effects regression analysis for 1.50 nations from 1971-2014 to understand how the interaction between clientelism and democracy impacts CO2 emissions. The findings reveal that controlling for clientelism reduces CO2 outputs more in high-income and low-income nations with higher levels of participatory democracy. However, the interaction is not statistically significant for all nations, nor for middle-income nations. These results suggest that reducing clientelist relationships in nations with high- and low-incomes, but not middle incomes will make participatory democracies more effective at reducing CO2 emissions.