In a growing body of literature in political science and environmental studies, scholars debate the effect of democracy on environmental degradation While some analysts argue that democracy reduces environmental degradation others hold that democracy may not reduce environmental degradation or may in fact even be harmful This article seeks to address this debate by focusing on the effect of democracy and political–regime type on levels of overfishing in sub–Saharan Africa. In this region, the democratization since the late 1980s has spurred increased optimism about the environment but there is clearly a lack of empirical investigations on what effects increased levels of democracy have had on, for example, overfishing. After a discussion of the theoretical literature on the subject – as well as of the proposed causal mechanisms – this paper tests the theoretical propositions about democracy’s potential effects on overfishing in a cross–country time series analysis using various democracy indices and the marine trophic index as independent and dependent variables respectively.