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AbstractA large strand of research holds that democracy with its broad representation and electoral accountability is beneficial for the provision of public goods. Yet, there is a large variation in how democracies perform, indicating that democratic institutions alone do not suffice for securing citizens' wellbeing. Recent studies have stressed the equal importance of state capacity for public goods delivery. These studies, however, rarely investigate how the lack of state capacity mutes the effects of democratic institutions on public goods provision. This article addresses this gap by using a mixed methods design. First, the conditional effects of democracy and quality of government (QoG) are tested on the previously under‐researched domain of the provision of clean water. The results show that democracy is associated with higher water quality only in countries where QoG is high. If QoG is low, more democracy is even related to lower water quality. The second stage of the analysis proceeds by examining how poor QoG disrupts the effects of democracy on public access to safe drinking water using interview data from a typical case of Moldova. The analysis illustrates that democracy has a number of positive effects and incentivises politicians to focus on the visible aspects of water provision, including the expansion of the water pipe network. However, low QoG hampers adoption and implementation of long‐term policies necessary for securing an aspect of water provision that is harder to achieve – namely water quality. This leaves the fresh pipes with dirty water.

Small island developing states (SIDS) have been identified as particularly vulnerable to natural disasters and climate change. However, although SIDS have similar geographical features, natural hazards produce different outcomes in different states, indicating variation in vulnerability. The objective of this article is to explore the sources of this variation. With the point of departure in theories about how political institutions affect adaptive capacities, this article sets out to investigate whether government effectiveness has an impact on the vulnerability of SIDS. While claims over the importance of institutions are common in the literature, there is a lack of empirical accounts testing the validity of such claims. This shortcoming is addressed by this study's time-series cross-sectional analysis using data from the International Disaster Risk database and the Quality of Government data set. The results show that government effectiveness has strong and significant effects on the number of people killed and affected by natural disasters.

An extensive literature shows that democracies tend to do a better job of protecting the environment than autocracies. Much less work has been done to explain the considerable variation in environmental quality within many authoritarian settings. We help fill this gap with an empirical study of Vietnam – one of the world's most stable authoritarian regimes as well as one of the most environmentally vulnerable. We focus on the relationship between interest group activity and environmental outcomes (air and water quality) at the district level. While the participation of more actors in civic and political life has the potential to improve outcomes by enhancing scrutiny of government, interest groups may also promote economic interests to the detriment of environmental protection. Our analysis shows that districts characterized by higher levels of local interest group activity tend to have lower air and water quality. This result is consistent across a range of model specifications and estimation strategies. These findings imply that organization of local interests may be detrimental to environmental quality in authoritarian settings and that effective mobilization of actors who would benefit from high environmental quality (i.e., citizens) may be overshadowed by those of pro-business interests. As such, our findings highlight the limits of popular participation related to environmental protection in authoritarian regimes – particularly those that base their legitimacy on economic development.

Natural disasters cause suffering for millions of people around the globe every year, and as climate change unfolds, the likelihood of natural catastrophes is increasing. While weather shocks such as earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods are beyond our control, the governments' capacity to protect populations largely determines the degree of human suffering in disasters. Democracies, with freedom of speech, broad public participation, and representation, are believed to protect their populations better than nondemocratic regimes. However, democratic institutions are insufficient for securing protection from disasters in contexts of corruption, poor planning, and public administration incompetence. We argue that the effect of democracy on the extent of human suffering in disasters is contingent on the ability of governments to implement their tasks or the quality of implementing institutions. We test this interaction hypothesis using time-series cross-sectional data from the Varieties of Democracy project, the Quality of Government dataset, and the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. The results show that more democracy is associated with fewer people being affected by natural disasters only in settings where institutional quality is high. When institutional quality is low, more people seem to suffer in democracies than in authoritarian states.

Long-lasting democratic institutions have been found to matter for the universal provision of reliable electricity. In this article we revisit this finding, suggesting that the effect of democracy on electricity provision is moderated by the quality of institutions shaping the implementation of public policies. We test the hypothesis positing the interaction effect between democracy and corruption using cross-national data on the share of population living in unlit areas. The results show that democracy is associated with a higher electrification rate only in low-corrupt contexts. When corruption is widespread, democratic experience is not correlated with higher rates of electrification. These findings suggest that the effect of democratic institutions is conditional on the quality of the institutions that shape policy implementation.

AbstractGeneralized trust is essential for collective action, which is at the heart of many societal problems. Institutional quality has been proposed as a driver of generalized trust, but while the correlation between the two is strong and robust, the evidence on the causal link is scant. We show that this relationship is causal. We first experimentally expose individuals to institutions of different quality, operationalized as their ability to prevent corrupt behavior. We then measure generalized trust using a trust game. The results show that institutional quality drives generalized trust and that this effect is generated by the mere doubt that corrupt behaviors might succeed, even without knowledge of occurrence or success of such behaviors. Cross‐country comparisons with novel data support our results. Our contributions are the first causal experimental evidence on the link between institutional quality and trust and a novel experimental design for modeling institutional quality in laboratory settings.