Over the past three decades, competitive elections are linked to higher rates of forest loss. Forest protection is a long-term public good, while clearing provides short-term private benefits that can be delivered to targeted voters. In contested races, politicians appear to trade access to forested land—for small-scale farming or timber use—for electoral support, producing measurable increases in deforestation.

🛰️ Mapping Forest Loss With Satellites and Election Returns

• Satellite-generated global forest cover data paired with the results of over 1,000 national-level elections between 1982 and 2016.
• The analysis exploits temporal variation in democratization, election years, and margins of victory to estimate political effects on annual forest-cover change.

🔎 Key Findings

• Countries that undergo a democratic transition lose an additional 0.8 percentage points of forest cover each year.
• Years with close elections show over 1 percentage point per year higher forest cover loss compared to nonelection years.
• A 10-point decrease in the margin of victory is associated with a 0.7 percentage point per year increase in deforestation.
• These increases are on the order of 5–10 times the average global rate of forest loss.

⚖️ What This Implies

• Democratization is associated with underprovision of an environmental public good—forests—rather than guaranteed improvements in environmental protection.
• Contested elections appear to be a partial mechanism: electoral competition creates incentives for politicians to deliver short-term private benefits (access to forest resources) at the expense of long-term public goods.

🌍 Why It Matters

• Findings challenge assumptions that democratization uniformly improves public-good provision and highlight a political channel that can produce substantial environmental harm.
• Results inform scholars and policymakers seeking to design institutions that protect long-term environmental assets from short-run electoral pressures.