I disagree.

Pollution in China was terrible. Pretty much everybody hated it, and it was not possible to hide or whitewash it.

The US was in the same position during 60-s and 70-s, and it fixed the worst of the pollution rapidly. The EPA was established during the freaking Nixon administration.

And it had a good fifty years or so before being abolished.

I think there were a lot of factors at play behind the will of the leader or form of government, including resources and technologies available to the respective nations.

Another anecdote where a democracy can deal with sufficiently bad pollution… eventually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London

Americans will always do the right thing, after they have tried everything else”; often attributed to Winston Churchill

But these are only examples when the pollution is so bad that it affects even the visibility in your own house.

The whole problem of the crisis is that you should also make actions for things that you cannot see. Or if they happen for your neighbor country.

That has not really happened yet.

Still working on it with ULEZ and Oxford Street.

Well, they'll at least report that they're doing it. I've heard that autocracies tend to have data quality issues that derive from messengers not wanting to be shot.

The thing with the air quality is that others can measure it too, or even see from the space.

https://dialogue.earth/en/pollution/how-climate-change-compl...

Problem is when the dictator is wrong and chose not to address it. Then it doesn't get done. That is not very efficient.

The Soviet Union's environmental record is significantly worse than the democracies.

I don’t recall anyone enforcing pollution reduction in there