16
often missing in low-income settings while they are relatively well established at higher develop-
ment stages.
The sizes of the effects of our measure of democracy on the changes in MTI are, however,
generally quite small, yet significant in certain groups of income. Thus, they should be interpreted
with care. The explained variance is often low in a first difference model, a fact that is evident in
the tables above.
Conclusions
With the point of departure in theories about democratic consolidation and sequencing, this article
argues that the debate over democracy’s virtuous or vicious effects on the environment may be
partly misinformed. More specifically, we argue that there are substantial reasons to believe that the
way democracy works – whether it is an instrument for collective action beneficial to the environ-
ment or an instrument for patronage, clientelism and redistribution to the ruler’s closest allies –
fundamentally depends on level of economic development. As such, we hypothesize that if not
preceded or accompanied by institutions that generate economic development, democracy may in
fact not be more than an empty shell, potentially even opening up yet other arenas for exploitation,
patronage and clientelism.
These theoretical propositions partly gain support in our empirical investigations. When we
analyze the effect of democracy on the changes in MTI in the entire sample of 142 countries across
34 years, we find a negative effect, indicating that democratic regimes tend to have a negative im-
pact on the marine environment. However, we contribute by advancing the analysis to study the
effect of democracy at different stages of economic development. The strongest and most straight-
forward result is that democracy has a significant negative effect on the health of marine ecosys-
tems during early stages of economic development, but as we climb the income ladder the effect
turns positive. That is, there are negative effects of democracy in settings of low gross national
income and positive effects when the economic development has reached a certain threshold. Until
a country becomes an upper middle-income country, democracy seems to have a negative effect on
the health of the marine environment, but the effect then turns positive and is significant for the
richest countries with a GNI per capita exceeding 20,000 USD.
Although these findings lend support to the theoretical claims about democracy’s different
effects, future studies ought to look closer into the specific mechanisms producing these outcomes. For
17
example, is it the institutions normally accompanying economic development – such as rule of law
or property rights protection – that make democracy have different effects during different stages
of economic development? Or, is it rather economic development per se that affects resource use
and exploitation patterns in society? That is, while we have strong theoretical reasons to believe that
democracy is more likely to work as an instrument for collective action in settings where other fun-
damental collective action problems involved in the process of state building and development
have already been solved, the exact blending, pacing and sequencing of institutional reforms neces-
sary to foster sustainable development and stewardship of natural resources remain to be explored.
18
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