| Summary: | What are the correlates of environmental performance? In particular, does globalization lead to environmental degradation? What is the role of democracy for environmental performance and do left-wing governments really care more about the environment? Using a novel and comprehensive measure of environmental performance, we test these three hypotheses for a panel of 134 countries for the period 2007–2016. Our results are surprising—we find no evidence that democracies are cleaner, left-wing governments perform better than right-wing governments, but centrist governments clearly have the highest environmental performance, and globalization is good for the environment. The positive impact of globalization, however, is driven by social globalization—economic and political globalization do not play a role.
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