Abstract
Environmental policy effectiveness is an area of particular interest as environmental problems threaten the lives of millions of people worldwide. This paper examines the impact of political variables including regime type, political openness, and corruption on environmental performance. Democracies are expected to have better environmental policy performance than authoritarian regimes. Regardless of regime type, regimes with greater political freedom are expected to have better environmental policy performance, as are regimes with less corruption. Scatter plots comparing regime type and environmental policy performance show that while democracies do tend to perform better than other types of regimes, authoritarian regimes sometimes also perform well, lending some support to the theory of authoritarian environmentalism. However, a higher level of political freedom does not always lead to better environmental policy performance, while corruption negatively affects the policy performance of all regime types.
How to Cite
Wright, A., (2015) “Political Factors in Environmental Policy Performance”, Capstone, The UNC Asheville Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship 28(1).
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