UC San Diego

The world is in the midst of upheaval resulting from existing institutions and power structures struggling to deal with new phenomena. In this dissertation, I examine how institutions and interests interact in the face of powerful environmental and technological changes.

The first project is an exploration of the relationship between natural resource dependence and environmental protection. I argue that because resource dependence causes environmental degradation, it can lead to political mobilization that results in greater protection. In democracies pro-protection pressures are more likely to influence policy, so adverse effects of resource dependence mainly apply to less democratic countries where extractive interests are more able to steer policymaking. To test this argument, I employ a novel panel regression discontinuity design at all terrestrial country-border pairs from 1992—2020, using geospatial data on protected area designation. I find that the effect of natural resource dependence on protected areas is conditional on democratic institutions.

The second project examines the effectiveness of international agreements in the face of biodiversity loss. The literature is mixed on whether international agreements are effective at producing domestic policy change, but there can be wide subnational variation in both policy changes and the strength of countervailing pressures. I apply this framework to protected areas. Using an original geospatial dataset on 846 ecoregions worldwide from 1992—2020, I find that when a democracy becomes more deeply embedded in the international environmental regime, it is more likely to protect more land. However, local economic pressures exert downward influence on protection.

The third project turns to technological change, focusing on the rise of the internet. My co-authors and I argue that the spread of the internet has contributed to recent trends in democratic backsliding, especially through its effect on political polarization. We test the empirical implications of our theory with a mixed-methods approach that combines a large-n quantitative comparative analysis of democratic backsliding in 97 democracies with a typical case study to trace the underlying causal mechanisms of the theory. Together, the findings indicate that with growing access to the internet has come increased likelihood of democratic backsliding.