The ratification of international environmental protocols
Why do some countries adopt the Kyoto protocol earlier than others? The following figure suggests that democracy clearly matters: More democratic countries are faster at ratifying the protocol, at least after about 1550 days. Democracy is measured by the Polity 3 dataset, the Vanhanen Index, the World Wide Governance Indicators and the Failed States Index. The big shift after about 1550 days can almost completely be explained by OECD membership, so there must have been some international policy coordination between OECD countries. Figure 1 shows a survival analysis using non-parametric Kaplan-Meier estimation with the data dichotomized at the median value. Democratic countries are faster at ratifying or adopting the protocol, regardless of the index used.
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The picture becomes even clearer when we look at ratification data of the Montreal protocol (figure 2). There is no formalized international policy coordination, and again, democratic countries adopt the Montreal protocol faster than non-democratic countries.
The pattern is even confirmed when we look at an international environmental protocol that is not related to climate change. The Cartagena protocol is an international agreement on biosafety. It largely supports the claim that democratic countries adopt international environmental protocols faster than non-democratic countries, even though the pattern is weaker for the Cartagena protocol than for climate protection policies (figure 3).
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Why do we find this impressively consistent pattern? Why do democratic countries ratify the protocols faster than the others? We find four theories about this in the literature:
- Corruption: In countries with high levels of corruption, industry lobbying can more easily assert national policies against climate protection or similar "threats".
- Awareness: Democratic countries have a better capacity to foresee upcoming long-term risks because science, policy-makers and the media engage in an open, public discourse.
- Collective goods and public choice: Climate protection is a collective good, and countries have an incentive to be freeriders regarding international agreements. But only autocratic countries can afford to do so because they do not have to face punishment by the voters.
- Capacity: Non-democratic countries usually have a lower level of development, less money and more other competing problems, so they assign a low priority to climate protection.
Which theory is now valid, and which one is wrong? The answer is: We don't know. The problem is that democracy, corruption control, development, freedom of speech and assembly, wealth, etc. are highly collinear, so it is not possible to separate the effects. This is rather a theoretical than a methodological problem. The plots in figure 4 exhibit the problem: Corruption, development and democracy can all be predicted by gross domestic product per capita.
There are only some small clues that may provide preliminary answers: If we try to assess whether corruption or democracy are responsible for ratification pace, it may be a good idea to look at countries that are democratic but also corrupt or countries that are neither corrupt nor democratic. The only strong outlier in this sense is Singapore, which scores low on most democracy scores and also low on the corruption index. Singapore ratifies the Montreal protocol very early but is an extreme laggard in the cases of Kyoto and Cartagena, so it does not provide us with a satisfactory answer. The second clue may be the difference between the two climate protocols, Kyoto and Montreal, and the biosafety protocol, Cartagena. On the one hand, the difference in pace between democratic and non-democratic countries is much less extreme for the Cartagena protocol, and biosafety is indeed much less important for the industry than pollution control, so this may be a case for the corruption theory. On the other hand, the difference is still there, and it is consistent over all indices, so this suggests that a combination of several explanations is at work. Which one is the most important can unfortunately not be determined at the moment.