Carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions are rapidly increasing across the world. While national governments are usually seen as having the power, authority, and ability to make significant reductions in their CO₂ outputs, cross-national research rarely focuses on the institutional structures of states that moderate their CO₂ emissions. Previous research that focuses on internal state factors largely focus on democracy and find wildly conflicting results. This research argues that clientelism is a missing piece of the puzzle in explaining how democracy impacts CO₂ emissions. Building on the extant contradictory research, the present study uses two-way fixed effects regression analysis for 150 nations from 1971-2014 to understand how the interaction between clientelism and democracy impacts CO₂ emissions. The findings reveal that controlling for clientelism reduces CO₂ outputs more in high-income and low-income nations with higher levels of participatory democracy. However, the interaction is not statistically significant for all nations, nor for middle-income nations. These results suggest that reducing clientelist relationships in nations with high- and low-incomes, but not middle incomes will make participatory democracies more effective at reducing CO₂ emissions.

全世界的二氧化碳（CO ₂）排放量正在迅速增加。虽然各国政府通常被视为具有权力，权威，并使他们削减显著能力CO ₂输出，跨国家的研究很少侧重于降低他们国家的体制结构的CO ₂排放量。先前关注内部状态因素的研究主要关注民主，并发现了相互矛盾的结果。这项研究认为，客户主义是解释民主如何影响CO ₂的难题中缺少的部分排放。基于现有的矛盾研究，本研究使用1971-2014年间150个国家的双向固定效应回归分析来了解客户主义和民主之间的相互作用如何影响CO ₂排放。研究结果表明，控制参与制主义在参与民主程度更高的高收入和低收入国家中会减少更多的CO ₂排放。但是，对于所有国家或中等收入国家而言，这种相互作用都不具有统计学意义。这些结果表明，在收入高和收入低的国家（而不是中等收入）的国家中减少客户与客户的关系将使参与式民主国家在减少CO ₂排放方面更加有效。