POL101Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Authoritarianism
Can Democracies Solve Climate Change?
●Authoritarian vs. Democracy
○Democracy: institutions to translate the will of the people into government
action/policy
■Elections, Domestic Political Institutions
■Often imperfect, can be disrupted in multiple ways, but at heart,
they are supposed to translate what people want into what the
government does
■Protection of Freedoms
●Speech, expression, press, religion, etc.
■Responsiveness to the population
○Authoritarian: Do not have institutions to translate the will of the people
into policies of the state
■The actions of the state represents what a single (dictatorship) or a
small group of people dictatorship (authoritarian, autocratic) want
■The people do not have basic civil liberties
■Do not have the kind of institutions/structure in place to respond to
the population, typically ignore the will of the people
●Can democracies solve Climate Change or are Authoritarian States better
equipped to deal with climate change?
●Democracies
○Sometimes Move quickly (Denmark, Germany)
○Sometimes not so much (US, Canada)
○Advantages:
■civic engagement
■capitalism tends to generate wealth so they usually have resources
necessary to entertain the energy transition
■Buy-in
■educated population
○Disadvantage:
■Slow
■Competing interests groups (with money)
■People always right?
●What they’re willing to do gets translated to government
policy, but they aren’t necessarily always right about science
●Authoritarianism
○Advantages
■Speed
●The apparatus of the state is on the same mission, when the
state is on a mission for renewable energy, they don’t have
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