Democracy‐Environment Nexus

Studying democracy is challenging because of the multiple perspectives on the concept. Something similar occurs with a multifactorial concept such as the environment. To pin both concepts down and assess the influence of the former on the latter, I went to the root meaning of democracy and analyzed the effect of citizens' participation in public decision-making on the environmental performance of 173 states across the world. For this, I compared countries with different degrees of direct democracy according to their environmental performance measured as the percentage of designated terrestrial protected area and highly protected area in their territories, using protected areas as a comprehensive proxy for “the environment”. Nonparametric statistical tests that considered relevant covariates, such as the countries' development status or corruption, were used. Results showed that citizens' participation in public decision-making is extremely uncommon among the world's so-called “democracies”. Moreover, I did not find a clear effect of direct democracy on terrestrial protected area coverage. In contrast, “membership in the European Union” and “corruption” had a clearly positive and negative effect on the “percentage of protected area”, respectively. Results on the effects of democracy on the environment are likely highly affected by the metrics used to define each item as well as by a potential number of known and hidden biases.