Issue 1 - Comparative Study on the Differences in Climate Change Mitigation Between Systems with Different Sizes of the Winning Coalition: CO2 Emissions in Focus

Abstract

The scholarly opinion on how autocracies, democracies, and other factors within those systems affect environmental performance appears to be controversial but promising for future research. Applying the selectorate theory, we attempt to examine the difference in the provision of a clean environment as a public good in systems with larger and smaller sizes of the winning coalition. We found no significant empirical evidence to support the notion that systems with larger winning coalitions are less likely to adopt a policy, and we argue that they are associated with lower carbon dioxide emissions than those with smaller coalitions. This might be because in the former systems, the policy enforcement mechanisms and thus their implementation are expected to be more efficient. Also, we notice that the regime subtypes of democracy and autocracy can suggest other answers to the question of what specific institutional system is associated with a certain level of emissions. Though the results shown by autocracies generally support the theory, those of democracies show some deviance; specifically, liberal democracies do not show an expected reduction in CO2 emissions with increases in the winning coalition. However, in general, our findings align with the selectorate theory, meaning that the theory’s underpinnings could be extended to another public good - clean air.