The Democratic Foundation of Climate Democracy: A Necessary Condition Analysis of European States

Contemporary liberal democracies face a critical dual challenge: the urgency of the climate crisis demands rapid, transformative action, while democratic governance itself confronts erosion through declining public trust, political polarization, and rising illiberalism. This intersection has sparked fundamental debate about whether democracy facilitates or hinders effective climate action. While some scholars argue that democratic accountability and public participation enable durable environmental protection, others contend that democratic deliberation is too slow and vulnerable to veto players to address the climate emergency effectively. This paper moves beyond this correlational debate to test a novel hypothesis of necessity: that high-quality democracy constitutes a prerequisite for developing the specialized governance arrangements required for legitimate and effective climate action. We employ Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA), a method specifically designed to identify prerequisite relationships, to examine 28 European countries (EU27 plus the United Kingdom). Our outcome variable is the 2024 Climate Democracy Index (CDI), which measures climate governance capacity through two pillars: Democratic Enablers (procedural rights like access to information, public participation, and access to justice) and Climate Governance & Engagement (specialized institutions such as framework laws, advisory bodies, and citizens' assemblies). As condition variables, we use five distinct dimensions of democracy from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset: electoral, liberal, egalitarian, participatory, and deliberative democracy. Our findings provide robust empirical support for democracy as a necessary condition for climate democracy. All five democratic dimensions impose statistically significant (p < 0.001) and substantively large constraints on climate governance capacity, with effect sizes ranging from d=0.558 (egalitarian democracy) to d=0.723 (electoral democracy). Electoral democracy emerges as the strongest bottleneck, constraining over 72% of potential climate governance capacity, followed closely by deliberative democracy (69%) and liberal democracy (67%). These constraints persist after rigorous robustness checks that control for economic development (GDP per capita, unemployment, trade openness) and carbon intensity (CO2 emissions per capita), demonstrating that democratic foundations provide non-substitutable political resources—legitimacy, accountability mechanisms, and coordination capacity—that material resources alone cannot replace. However, our analysis also reveals a substantial "sufficiency gap": while democracy is necessary for high climate governance performance, it does not guarantee it. Several countries with robust democratic systems still exhibit relatively weak climate democracy, indicating that political will, strategic policy choices, and deliberate institutional innovation are required to translate democratic potential into effective climate action. These findings challenge both technocratic arguments that democracy hinders climate action and overly optimistic claims about democracy automatically delivering environmental protection. Instead, we demonstrate that democracy serves as an enabling foundation, a floor rather than a ceiling, for climate governance innovation in Europe.