Democracy and tourism demand in European countries: does environmental performance matter?

Recently, empirical studies revealed that democracy is positively associated with environmental quality through the freedom gained by the people to demand environmental protection. In this paper, we explore empirical evidence linking how environmental performance interacts with democracy to influence tourism demand in twenty-seven European countries. To achieve this objective, we use the method of moments quantile regression (MMQR) model by Machado and Silva (J Econ 213: 145-173, 2019) and a balanced panel data covering the period 2002 to 2014. The empirical results suggest that environmental performance interacts heterogenously with democracy at different quantiles of the conditional distribution to stimulate tourism demand. Also, the effect of an increase in income and environmental performance is stronger in countries with lower tourism market shares than in countries with higher tourism market shares. The major implication for this study is that countries with lesser shares of the tourism market should strive for higher environmental performance and economic development as this would grant them more advantage in the tourism sector than their counterparts with higher market shares.