This paper reviews the evidence on authoritarianism and development from the perspective of a policy-maker providing advice to an ostensibly developmental authoritarian regime. It finds that the cross-national statistical evidence on regime type and development is inconclusive, and argues that varying experiences of development under authoritarianism are better-captured by structured-focused comparisons using ‘developmental states’ and ‘political settlements’ frameworks.
Although these frameworks provide a good starting point for thinking about development in particular authoritarian regimes, they have little to say about whether transitions from less to more developmental forms of authoritarianism are possible or how they take place, or how transitions from authoritarianism to democracy can be managed without derailing development. More research on these issues is needed.
Key findings:
- Knowing whether a state is authoritarian or democratic does not allow one to predict whether or not it will be developmental. Authoritarian regimes have been responsible, at the extreme, for both astounding development successes and failures, with most regimes lying somewhere in between.
- The performance of democracies tends to be less extreme, though there has been at least one democratic big developmental success. In general, there is little to choose performance-wise between democracies and authoritarian regimes, although the former appear to be difficult to sustain in low-income conditions (a fact which may also explain the absence of democratic big developmental failures).
- Some recent literature finds that increases in democracy in Africa lead, on average, to increases in growth, but these findings are of limited relevance to in-country policy-makers who need to know whether a democratic increase in their country will lead to growth, or its reverse.
- Characteristics that have been shown to underpin developmental states include a combination of internal and external threats generating an incentive to develop; institutionalized solutions to the problem of leadership succession; a set of flexible policies well-adapted to the country’s factor endowments; and at least an incipient enforcement and implementation capability.
- These criteria apply also to democratic developmental states, with the added conditions that the ruling elite must be committed to democracy as the best means of maintaining its privileges, while subordinate classes must be sufficiently well-organized to ensure that democratic institutions are not merely a smokescreen.