| 英文摘要: | A more democratic world, and a world that responds effectively to the challenges of climate change, are common aims of the international community. But are they mutually compatible? Political scientists are often shamelessly normative as academics go. In democracies they are free to investigate and write what they please, as are researchers who study the physical and biological dimensions of climate change. Statistical analyses show that democracy benefits people in manifold ways. Democracies are wealthier than autocracies1. And yet independent of per capita income, they score better on both measures of human rights2 and happiness3. Any two democratic states are also famously unlikely to go to war with one another4. And so the promotion of democracy has been enshrined in supranational bodies5. The United Nations has an electoral assistance division. Democracy is a prerequisite for membership of the European Union. Several countries, among them Kosovo and East Timor, have been directly administered by an international community engaging in democratic regime building within them. But when political scientists ask whether democracy is conducive to attenuating or adapting to climate change, the answer from both theory and data — however urgent it may seem — is less than certain6. The era of climate change consciousness has witnessed a flow and an ebb of democracy. In the early 1990s, democracy's star was ascending apace. The Rio Earth Summit was convened a mere six months after the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Its dissolution thrust democratization on Eastern Europe and Central Asia, creating a burst within a larger trend that is known as democracy's Third Wave7, and that had been continuing since the 1970s, when dictators fell in Southern Europe and then all over Latin America. Even as the number of electoral democracies levelled off, democratization continued into this century, as aggregate planetary levels of civil and political freedom kept rising. In recent years, the liberal self-confidence that ensued after the end of the Cold War has been shaken. One in every five democracies that existed in the third wave has now been reversed8. Peak democracy came — and went — in 2005. Every year that has passed since then has brought declines in both the proportion of electoral democracies and the average quality of democracy, as measured by a composite index9 of open political competition, respect for civil liberties, press freedom and so on. Negotiators slogged it out at the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties in 2009, following a year that saw four coups in Africa10. Those at the Durban meeting in 2011 chatted optimistically about the recent Arab Spring, perhaps unaware that events in Tahrir Square prompted such a fearful up-tick in repressive strategies by authorities in China, Russia and various Eurasian and African countries, that the net result was a more authoritarian world9.
There is little or no evidence that climate change had a hand in the seven consecutive years of global democratic backsliding — although the typically peaceful influence of democracy has been shown to be insufficient to overcome the claimed link11 between years of warm weather and the onset of civil war in subSaharan Africa. The backsliding trend has been pinned on bad governance8 (not on bad finances, which the political science literature blamed for earlier regressions). Nonetheless, some researchers argue that climate change will encourage the spread of authoritarianism in the future, as democracy is perceived as failing to handle its effects. For one thing, democracies are hamstrung by the need for political parties to appeal to voters when the electoral cycle next swings around. “Some parties will always run on a platform of not enacting legislation that is intended to do something about climate change [and is probably economically unattractive],” says Mark Beeson, of Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. “And as the scale and immediacy of the environmental challenge becomes apparent and implacable, restricting people's ability to behave in particular ways through essentially authoritarian rules, at the corporate or individual level — such as China's one-child policy — may make more sense, however normatively unattractive that may be.” This argument, combined with authoritarianism's regional historical legacy and the example of China's economic success, has convinced Beeson that dictatorships will return to East Asia12. Theory cuts both ways, however. The argument that some political elites have to place greater emphasis on short-term than on long-term planning has been used conversely, to contend that dictators won't establish emissions-cutting laws because their hold on power is characterized by paranoia and precariousness, particularly in the contemporary era. An alternative line of reasoning builds on collective action theory. It maintains that the citizens of democracies are not only more likely to demand action on climate change by virtue of their informational and organizational advantages (their access to a free press, to independent scientific research, plus their freedom to associate), but that the structure of democratic societies makes the provision of public goods easier. This is because the opportunity costs of providing a public good, such as environmental policy, are widely spread in democracies. In autocracies, however, the equivalent opportunity costs are concentrated among a small circle of powerful individuals. And by definition, no one — not even the most impoverished peasant struggling under a brainwashing totalitarian ruler — can be excluded from consuming public goods. The net benefits of environmental policy are thus bigger for the median voter in a democratic country than they are for the median member of the ruling elite in a dictatorship. In response to conflicting theory, researchers appeal to data. This is a sticky business in this case. For one thing, some of the existing globe-sweeping analyses mainly serve to underscore the importance of methodological detail. For example, Li and Reuveny13 find that whether their correlation between democracy and national CO2 emissions over the period 1961–1997 is positive or negative hinges on how democracy is scored: as either a dichotomous or continuous variable. But this is not to say that the field is void of intriguing and relevant conclusions.
In a limited sense, the evidence should reassure idealists. Democracy and climate policy formation do tend to go together, although there are occasional studies that suggest ambiguity14. But the evidence also suggests that more democracy will not necessarily bring about better practical results from whatever climate laws are enacted or public promises made — at least, not any time soon. This latter insight came to light in a paper15 published a decade ago, in which Eric Neumayer of the London School of Economics asked whether democracies show stronger international environmental commitment. He included indicators such as compliance with the reporting requirements under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora and participation in environmental intergovernmental organizations. The results were robust whichever measure of democracy was used, and whether or not developing countries were included in the analysis. Neumayer reasoned that democracies were much more likely to sign up to international environmental commitments, but only slightly more likely than non-democracies to actually follow through on them. Words–deeds gaps, as Thomas Bernauer, a political scientist at ETH Zurich, likes to call them, are also evident when a state's commitment to mitigating climate change is analysed in isolation. Bernauer and his colleague, Michèle Bättig, gathered data from 185 countries during democracy's most recent crescendo, between 1990 and 200416. They found that emissions from the transportation sector were the biggest wedge in the words–deeds gap, and posed a lesser problem for autocratic states. Overall, democracies were indeed more likely to say they would fight the causes of climate change. But their respect for individual freedoms (and probably also their greater wealth) meant that where emissions cuts involved restricting citizens' mobility, the statements of environmentally inclined democratic leaders rang hollow. The encouraging part of this association — the words part — seems to be driven by certain institutional arrangements over others. Specifically, how electoral systems express voters' preferences and the extent to which different forms of democratic government concentrate or diffuse power explain a decent portion of the general empirical link between democracy and good intentions17. Proportional representation has been shown to mean greener representation18, because parties with a prominent environmental agenda are typically minority parties. Put another way, electoral systems where representatives from different parties are elected in accordance with the percentage of the vote that they each win tend to set stricter environmental policies than majoritarian systems do. This is because parties in proportional systems aim to appeal to all parts of the electorate, including minority green voters, in order to maximize their number of legislative seats. But only the median voters' preferences provide electoral incentive in majoritarian systems. A similar claim can be made for parliamentary as opposed to presidential democracies (Fig. 1). In a paper published in 2007, Per Fredriksson, an economist at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, and his colleague Jim Wollscheid, of Texas A&M University, reported19 that presidential systems enact environmental policy so distinctly from parliamentary systems that, by this measure, their behaviour is not significantly different from autocracies. “Even when we excluded the United States from the model, there were no material shifts in the results,” Fredriksson points out. His explanation focuses on the greater degree of legislative cohesion found in parliamentary systems: within their sample of democracies with parliaments, they further found that nations in which the government faces an investiture vote (a vote of confidence that must pass before the government can assume office) set even stricter environmental policies.
|
