Wild Spaces or Polluted Places: Contentious Policies, Consensus Institutions, and Environmental Performance in Industrialized Democracies

Joshua Ozymy and Denis Rey
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Joshua Ozymy: Joshua Ozymy is an associate professor of political science at Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi.
Denis Rey: Denis Rey is an assistant professor of government and world affairs at the University of Tampa.

Global Environmental Politics, 2013, vol. 13, issue 4, 81-100

Abstract: This article contributes to the literature on environmental governance in industrialized democracies by showing that effectively conserving biodiversity requires different institutional strategies than reducing air emissions. Institutional effectiveness diminishes as the politically contentiousness of the issue increases, moving from biodiversity to air pollution, and then climate change. Drawing on Lijphart's theory of consensus democracy and theories of functional and actorcentered federalism, we use the 2010 Environmental Performance Index and panel analysis on twenty-one OECD countries to show that consensus-based party systems improve performance. We find that centralization generates greater improvements with respect to air pollution than biodiversity, but that decentralized strategies can improve biodiversity when implemented alongside corporatist bargaining structures. © 2013 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keywords: environmental governance; biodiversity; climate change; air pollution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q53 Q54 Q57 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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