Supporters of democracy might take special pleasure in noting how well democratic decision-making, even as messy as it typically is, has handled several problems of the generation of collective bads, such as air and water pollution. Many autocratic states, which are often thought to have advantages in pushing through difficult policies, have been environmental disasters while Western democracies were actually improving their environments even while continuing economic growth. At the same time, democratic states – especially, but not only, the United States – have been relatively poor at handling distributive issues such as poverty and equal opportunity. These contrary results are inherent in the nature of democracy and the kinds of problems at stake. This fact bodes ill, oddly, for international handling of collective bads.
Democracy is particularly good at handling problems of coordination, sometimes including relatively difficult problems of coordination within the context of standard collective actions. It is generally poor at handling more conflicted issues, such as, especially, straight distributional issues. The regulation of many collective bads in our time falls on both sides of the democratic divide. In so far as these problems are purely domestic, as in the pollution of, say, Lake Tahoe, they are relatively easily seen as coordination problems by at least the bulk of the relevant population. In so far as they are very substantially international, as in the destruction of the ozone layer or acid rain, however, they often have massive distributive implications that would make their resolution difficult even in domestic politics but that make resolution extremely difficult in international politics.
