SIGNATURE WORK
CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION 2022

While climate change has been put on the international policy agenda in recent years, individual countries have varied in their willingness and ability to make contributions to the goal of keeping the world below 1.5º C of warming above pre-industrial temperatures. This paper uses a diverse case selection approach to study the effects of ideology, regime type, and centralization on environmental policy. Results indicate that left-wing countries strongly outperform right-wing countries, centralized countries slightly outperform decentralized countries, and regime type on its own has no consistent effect. However, findings show that while both right-wing and left-wing democracies tend toward average performance, left-wing authoritarian countries substantially outperform democracies while right-wing authoritarian countries substantially underperform. The case studies are used to demonstrate how ideological preferences for economic growth or human welfare creates differences in policy, and how democratic institutions can moderate this policy. Alternate explanations for the results, such as historical causal pathways, are also explored.