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Performance and persistence ofautocracies in comparison: introducingissues and perspectivesAurel Croissant a & Stefan Wurster aa Institute of Political Science , Ruprecht-Karls-University ,Bergheimer Strasse 58, D-69115 , Heidelberg , GermanyPublished online: 05 Apr 2013.

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Performance and persistence of autocracies in comparison: introducingissues and perspectives

Aurel Croissant∗ and Stefan Wurster∗∗

Institute of Political Science, Ruprecht-Karls-University, Bergheimer Strasse 58, D-69115 Heidelberg,Germany

Authoritarianism research has evolved into one of the fastest growing areas in comparativepolitics and political economy. However, the newly awakened interest in autocraticregimes goes hand in hand with a lack of systematic research on the results of the politicaland substantive policy performance of variants of autocratic regimes. In this article weintroduce the individual contributions to this special issue and summarize their findingswith regard to three core research questions: What are the differences between autocraciesand democracies, as well as between different forms of authoritarian regimes, with regardto their outcome performance in selected policy fields? Does policy performance matter forthe persistence of authoritarian rule? How can we conceptualize different types ofautocratic regimes and do differences in the availability of performance data matter for theresults of empirical studies comparing democracies and autocracies or different types ofnon-democratic regimes?

Keywords: autocracy; dictatorship; political performance; regime persistence; policyoutcomes

Introduction

One of the characteristics of political science research is that research topics experience recur-

rent cycles. This also applies to comparative studies on autocracies.1 While exploring the

processes of transition from dictatorship to democracy and the consolidation of young democ-

racies shaped the agenda of comparative political science during the 1980s and 1990s like

hardly any other issue, authoritarianism research during the first decade of the new millennium

has evolved into one of the fastest growing areas in comparative politics and political economy

(see Figure 1).

Three political developments have caused this shift. The first one is the end of the so-called

third wave of democratisation (Huntington 1991). According to the annual Freedom in the

World Report by Freedom House, the proportion of electoral democracies among all states in

the world is declining – from 64% in the year 2006 (123 of 193 countries) to 60% in 2011

(117 of 195; Puddington 2012, p. 29). Second, not all regime changes in the past have led to

democracy. In some cases, new authoritarian regimes emerged which combine democratic insti-

tutions and autocratic practices and which researchers classify as ‘electoral’ (Schedler 2006) or

‘competitive authoritarianism’ (Levitsky and Way 2010). Authoritarian regimes that play the

game of multiparty elections are not a new phenomenon, but they seem more widespread

today than at the beginning of the third wave (Brooker 2009, Morse 2012). Third, the economic

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

∗Aurel Croissant is Professor at the Institute of Political Science, Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg,Germany. Email: aurel.croissant@ipw.uni-heidelberg.de∗∗Stefan Wurster is Research Associate at the Institute of Political Science, Ruprecht-Karls-University Hei-delberg, Germany. Email: wurster@uni-heidelberg.de

Contemporary Politics, 2013

Vol. 19, No. 1, 1–18, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569775.2013.773199

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rise of some autocratically ruled emerging markets (China, Singapore, etc.) seems to place in

question the assumption that the established liberal democracies in the West have a general

‘democracy advantage’ (Halperin et al. 2004). This ‘advantage’ has come under particular criti-

cism since the advent of the current financial and economic crisis.

The comparative analysis of non-democratic political regimes is not a new research topic,

though. Modern autocracy research has evolved substantially over the past six decades in

three major waves: In the first generation of totalitarianism research, the studies of Arendt

(1951), Friedrich and Brzezinski (1965) and others aimed at the systematic description of the

process of rule and the normative assessment of past and contemporary totalitarian systems.

The second generation developed the seminal distinction between democracies, totalitarian

regimes and authoritarian regimes (Linz 1964, 1975). The focus of this research was mainly

the study of the origins, organisational forms and practices of single-party autocracies and mili-

tary regimes, as well as of modern forms of personal rule, mainly in the non-Western societies

(cf. Brooker 2009). Although the analysis of different forms of autocracy remained a relevant

topic even during the heyday of democratisation studies in the 1980s and 1990s, this second

wave of genuine autocracy research clearly ebbed as researchers began to focus on the impor-

tance of authoritarian rule for the opportunities in, paths to and challenges of democratisation

and the consolidation of post-authoritarian regimes (Ulfelder 2005).

As a result of the aforementioned developments, theoretical and empirical comparative

research on autocracies has experienced a ‘renaissance’ (Bank 2009) in the last 15 years or

so. The seminal study by Geddes (1999) on the relationship between the forms of autocracy

and the probability of regime change, as well as Linz’ (2000) call to the research community

to pay more attention to the new varieties of semi-democratic or authoritarian rule that were

emerging, provided the impetus for the proliferation of new research agendas, theories,

methods and empirical studies on ‘authoritarianism in the age of democratisation’ (Brownlee

2007). At the same time, the new authoritarianism research shares some common characteristics.

These include, in particular (cf. Schedler 2009, Art 2012, Kollner and Kailitz 2013):

Figure 1. Number of articles in the social sciences citation index (SSCI) dealing with authoritarianism orautocracies (1990–2012).Notes: Number of articles in political science, area studies, international relations or economics that haveauthoritarian∗ or autocra∗ in the title; excluding book reviews and articles dealing with new democracies’authoritarian pasts/legacies, and post-authoritarianism or (subnational) authoritarianism in democracies.Source: Social Sciences Citation Index, Web of Science (Heidelberg University), accessed last 27 Decem-ber 2012.

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1. A focus on issues of the survival of old and new forms of autocratic regimes. An analysis

of the interaction of the autocratic strategies of repression, legitimacy and the cooptation

of elites and societal forces and their implications for the persistence or failure of auto-

cracy (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003, Gerschewski 2013, Merkel et al. 2013). This

also includes a number of highly important, rational choice-based theories in the field

of comparative political economy that analyse the political logic of regime survival in

different regime settings and their consequences for policy-making in autocracies and

democracies (Wintrobe 1990, 1998, Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003).

2. A reappraisal of the role of political institutions such as elections, legislatures and parties

in autocracies and the importance of these institutions for the reproduction of authoritar-

ian rule (Schedler 2002, 2006, Brownlee 2007, Gandhi and Przeworski 2007, Gandhi

2008, Magaloni 2008, Wright 2008a, Magaloni and Kricheli 2010).

The renewed interest in political institutions and types of ‘authoritarianism with adjectives’

(Linz 2000, p. 34) and the emergence of new theories of authoritarian rule have provided a con-

siderable amount of knowledge for the comparative analysis of autocracies. The starting point

for this special issue, however, is the observation that the newly awakened interest in autocratic

regimes goes hand in hand with a lack of systematic research on the results of the political and

substantive policy performance of variants of autocratic regimes. Moreover, and what is

especially important for the theme of this special issue, studies of the policy performance of

authoritarianism have generally identified the effect of regime type by using indices that rank

countries on a scale from perfect democracy to absolute autocracy (e.g. Polity IV; cf. Marshall

and Jaggers 2009), thus ‘ignoring the substantial differences between various forms of auto-

cracy’ (Bove and Brauner 2011, p. 2). As a result, these studies are of limited use for answering

the question of whether there are significant and systematic differences between different types

of non-democratic regimes in their outcome performance in a variety of policy fields including

economic, environmental, social, foreign or domestic security policy. This contrasts with the

well-established research on institutional determinants of political performance in various

types of democracy (cf. Roller 2013).

Most likely, it has been the lack of appropriate regime and performance data that has hindered

comparative research on political performance across types of autocratic regimes, but the avail-

ability of data has improved considerably. Several measurements of authoritarian regimes have

emerged in recent years which allow differentiations within the category of authoritarian

regimes and whose data can be used to systematically compare output and outcome performance

of policies within different types of dictatorship as well as between different types of dictatorship

and subtypes of democracy. Moreover, data accessibility has improved significantly for various

policy outcome variables. The contributions in this volume demonstrate this last point.

Comparing the performance of autocracies

This special issue focuses on the performance–persistence nexus in the study of authoritarian-

ism. It addresses the following core questions: What are the differences between autocracies and

democracies, as well as between different forms of authoritarian regimes, in regard to their

outcome performance in selected policy fields, and are these differences related to the type of

authoritarian regime? This question aims at exploring the institutional conditions that shape

dictators’ incentives and induce them to undertake specific policies in a variety of categories

of government performance, e.g. social, environmental and economic performance.

The second core question asks if policy performance matters for the persistence of author-

itarian rule. This question aims at integrating the ‘performance factor’ into the current debate

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on the survival of authoritarian regimes by asking if and how policy performance affects the sur-

vival abilities of autocratic regimes.

In order to answer these two questions, however, it is necessary to discuss how types of auto-

cratic regimes can be conceptualised and measured and if differences in the availability of per-

formance data matter for the results of empirical studies comparing democracies and autocracies

or different types of non-democratic regimes.

The necessity of distinguishing between forms of autocratic regimes

The contributions in this issue all share two basic assumptions, although they diverge in their

perspectives on the topic. First of all, the prevalent dichotomy of democracy–dictatorship is

of limited use for studying of patterns of performance and persistence across political

regimes. For example, one of the central questions in comparative political economy concerns

the effects of regime types on economic performance. Since the 1960s, there has been extensive

research on the question of whether democracy or autocracy is better for economic growth

(Wu 2004, Sunde 2006). The conclusions, however, remain mixed. But scholars who contend

that, on average, democracies perform better argue that democratic institutions serve the

function of constraining political leaders’ discretion and shaping rulers’ incentives in a way

that promotes more growth-enhancing policies (Rodrick 1996). Hence, democratic experience

is positively associated, at least in the long term, with stronger economic performance

(Gerring et al. 2005, p. 356) and with higher government effectiveness on other key indicators

such as security, child mortality rates, education, life expectancy and access to drinking water

(Halperin et al. 2004). Authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, do uniformly poorly; they

tend to promote growth retarding policies because dictators face less credible constraints on

discretionary and predatory behaviour (Rodrick 1996, Faust 2010, Wu 2012).

A glance at the average growth rates in autocracies and democracies over the time span

1950–2000 shows that democracies do indeed exhibit higher growth rates than autocracies,

although the gap is less substantial than is often assumed (cf. Table 1).

More importantly for the theme of this special issue, however, is the observation that the

standard deviation of economic growth rates in autocracies is much greater than in democracies.

Even if one accepts that the ‘average’ autocracy lags behind the ‘average’ democracy on econ-

omic growth, Table 1 shows that dictatorships vary far more in terms of economic growth rates

than democracies. In addition, some autocracies exhibit higher growth rates than democracies,

although the majority of them grow much more slowly than democracies. The group of auto-

cratic high performers includes not only developmental dictatorships in East Asia, such as

Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia and Taiwan and, in recent decades, the People’s Republic

of China and Vietnam, but also a few autocracies in Latin America (e.g. Pinochet’s Chile)

and the Middle East (Oman, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE); cf. Obinger 2004).

Table 1. Growth rates (real per capita GDP) in autocracies and democracies, 1950–2000.

Autocracies Democracies

GDP per capita growth rates 1.94 2.14Standard deviation of growth rates 7.26 5.37Number of observations 2914 2292

Notes: Unit of observations: Country-year. The cutting points for democracy/autocracy using democratic scores in PolityIV data: authoritarian Regime ≤ 5 and democracy Regime . 5. GDP per capita is taken from the Penn World Table 6.1(2002).Source: Wu (2004, p. 2).

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The contributions in this special issue investigate whether regime type is a factor that could

explain the variation among authoritarian regimes in terms of policy performance. This is not to

argue that autocratic institutions are the only factor that could explain autocrats’ policy choices

and their outcomes. Clearly it is not. The existing research and the articles in this issue show that

other factors also matter – the most likely candidates being structural factors such as ethno-lin-

guistic diversity, natural resource endowments and geography, social capital and political

culture, historical legacies and class or ethnic group dynamics or geopolitical factors

(Al-Ubaydli 2008, Gerring and Thacker 2008, Wu 2012). Among the conditions under which

even dictatorships can develop a demonstrable political performance profile are high investment,

secure property rights, political stability, restrained state intervention, powerful bureaucracy,

relatively low corruption and high levels of education of the population (Obinger 2004). In

the latter half of the twentieth century, the developmental dictatorships in East Asia, in particu-

lar, fulfilled these conditions, which is why ‘almost all the recent examples of successful author-

itarian modernization cluster in East Asia rather than other parts of the world’ (Fukuyama 2012,

p. 16).

Nevertheless, the contributions in this issue are united by the assumption that autocratic insti-

tutions and the specific configurations of elite actors within authoritarian regime coalitions

induce dictators to undertake certain policies and that different authoritarian institutions are

therefore an important piece of the puzzle of government performance in dictatorships. There

are indeed several theoretical arguments as to how and why different forms of autocracy

differ in their policies and policy performances. For example, the new institutionalism in the

study of authoritarianism argues that institutions such as parties or legislatures are likely to

have a constraining impact on policy selection in dictatorships. Furthermore, authoritarian insti-

tutions may help to mitigate the problem of the ‘dictator’s dilemma’, in which citizens feign

support for the ruler even as they collude to rebel, increasing the degree of insecurity a dictator

faces (Tullock 1987, Wintrobe 1998); to establish credible commitments, increasing the degree

of security an investor faces (Gehlbach and Keefer 2011, 2012); or to provide political leaders

with information about policy preferences among voters and elites, increasing their ability to

introduce policies specifically designed to attract support from critical segments of the national

elites and the electorate (Magaloni 2008, Miller 2012).

Another theoretical perspective directs attention to the relationship between the type of dic-

tatorship and the dictator’s time horizons, which influences incentives for favouring certain

policy options (Olson 1993, Knutsen and Fjelde 2013). Furthermore, some scholars build on

theoretical works that emphasise the relationship between the relative size of the ‘selectorate’

and the ‘winning coalition’ (Bueno de Mesquita 2003) in a political system and the incentives

that this creates for political leaders and its consequences for government policies: When the

‘winning coalition’ is small, as, for example, in military regimes in comparison to one-party

authoritarianism, or in any autocracy in comparison to democracies, a political leader faces

incentives to buy the support of the members of his winning coalition with targeted goods

(like subsidies or corruption). In a large coalition system, by contrast, it is more effective to

create support by providing untargeted public goods. This should trigger systematically different

outcomes in terms of social, environmental and economic performance (Wurster 2011, Bader

2012, McGuire 2013).

The performance–persistence nexus

The second assumption on which the idea for this special issue rests is that the performance of

political regimes and their persistence are related. Since the comparative politics literature

employs different concepts of performance (Hogstrom 2013, p. 9), we need to clarify our

Contemporary Politics 5

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understanding of performance (and persistence) beforehand. The concept of performance used

throughout this issue is limited to political performance or, more precisely, government perform-

ance similar to Roller’s political effectiveness concept (Roller 2005). On the basis of this

concept, the individual contributions use different outcome variables to measure actual

regime performance in different policy areas (e.g. economic development, social cohesion

and environmental protection).

Furthermore, this introduction and the articles in this issue use the concept of persistence in

contrast to the broader and empirically more difficult to grasp concept of stability (cf. Merkel

et al. 2013). Persistence is understood as the absence of change, e.g. the continuance or perma-

nence of authoritarian subtypes (Geddes 1999, Hadenius and Teorell 2007). This definition is

more narrow than the duration of authoritarian regimes per se (Cheibub et al. 2009), but it is

broader than a focus on the longevity of dictators (Svolik 2012).

Although researchers use different concepts, typologies and measurement methods (see

Roller 2013, Wahman et al. 2013), the findings of recent research in determining the average

durability of various forms of autocratic regimes produce converging results (see Table 2).

Output legitimacy and the performance dilemma in authoritarian regimes

The data in Table 2 confirm the earlier findings that monarchies last the longest on average,

while military regimes, in particular, tend to be short lived.2 The causes of these findings are

numerous and so far remain incompletely resolved. However, policy performance might well

play a role. The contributions in this issue and other studies indicate that the ‘average’ military

regime underperforms in almost every aspect of foreign policy, domestic security policy, econ-

omic policy, social policy and environmental policy (see Table 4). The problem of performance

in military regimes is exacerbated, firstly, because military dictators ‘rarely elaborate full-blown

regime ideologies to justify long-term authoritarian rule’ and therefore ‘they tend to enjoy less of

a cushion of ideological legitimacy to help them weather (. . .) tough times’ (Lai and Slater 2006,

Table 2. Mean durability of different types of authoritarian regimes (in years).

Dataset Type of authoritarian regimeMean regime

durability

Democracy–Dictatorship Dataset(Cheibub et al. 2009)

Civilian dictatorships(n ¼ 143)

18.52

Military regimes (n ¼ 137) 12.36Monarchies (n ¼ 26) 29.88

Global Political Regimes Dataset(Geddes et al. 2012)

Military regimes (n ¼ 78) 7.42Monarchies (n ¼ 19) 31.31Party regimes (n ¼ 83) 27.24Personal regimes (n ¼ 101) 11.39

Authoritarian Regimes DataSet, version 2.1(Hadenius and Teorell 2010)

Military regimes (n ¼ 90) 9.91Monarchies (n ¼ 18) 23.72(Limited) Multiparty regimes

(n ¼ 140)8.60

No party regimes (n ¼ 2) 18.00Single-party regimes (n ¼ 57) 13.79

Notes: Unit of observation: Number of regime spells. The differences (lower life span in our calculations) between ourcalculations of average regime type durability and the findings of Hadenius and Teorell (2007) is explained by the factthat Hadenius and Teorell backdated the starting years of regimes to 1960. We calculated average duration for the timespan 1972–2005.Source: Croissant (2013a).

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pp. 116–117). This, in turn, increases the need to invest in repression, which renders the delivery

of political goods more difficult. Secondly, military regimes have the highest level of military

spending of all types of authoritarian regimes (Bove and Brauner 2011). Although the older

‘guns vs. butter’ literature generated conflicting empirical findings, recent studies have found

that high military expenditures are deleterious to national economic performance because

they divert government resources that could be spent on public services, infrastructure,

human capital development or lower taxes (Berthelemy et al. 1994, Knight et al. 1996,

Bowman 2002, Aizenman and Glick 2006). As a result, military rulers are more likely to face

problems of sustaining sufficient levels of support that derives from the effectiveness of their

policies (‘output legitimacy’; Scharpf 1999, Schmidt 2012).

But the performance–persistence nexus also needs to be discussed for other forms of auto-

cratic regimes. Good economic performance provides resources for those in power that can be

used to reward loyalty, to coopt national elites and to finance repression (Schmidt 2012).

In addition, economic growth is a resource that can be used in the competition for votes,

especially in ‘competitive authoritarianism’ (cf. Al-Ubaydli 2008).

Furthermore, as Lipset and Larkin (2004, p. 209) write, ‘(s)table political systems, even

authoritarian ones, cannot rely primarily on force. The alternative to force is legitimacy, a

broadly accepted systemic “title to rule”’.3 Based on the classical definition of Weber (1978),

a regime is empirically legitimate if people believe it to be so (Beetham 1991, p. 9, Lipset

and Larkin 2004, p. 210). As Merkel et al. (2013) and Tanneberg et al. (2013) note, this

belief can originate from a variety of sources and stretch along a plurality of dimensions.

Drawing upon Easton’s (1965) differentiation between ‘diffuse’ and ‘specific’ support, they

argue that the second form of support is connected to the performance and output of the political

system. In autocracies this is primarily associated with socio-economic achievements and the

provision of political goods such as domestic security and protection from external threats.

While it is possible for dictators to open other sources of ‘diffuse’ support – for example, ideol-

ogy, traditional values and norms, historical merits or the personal charisma of an autocratic

leader – weak or declining government performance increases the probability of an emerging

crisis of regime legitimation, especially in those autocracies that cannot count ‘on an established

belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority

under them’ (Weber 1978, p. 215).4

Autocracies are structurally disadvantaged, though, in providing legitimacy compared to

democracies (see recently Schmidt 2012). First of all, autocracies lack the procedures which

link political decisions with citizens’ preferences. ‘Input legitimacy’ (Scharpf 1999) is weak,

whereas in modern democracies these mechanisms are reflected in representative institutions

in which political decision-makers can be held accountable by the means of elections, free

media and a vibrant civil society (ibid.). Furthermore, with the exception of fascist regimes

and the post-totalitarian communist regimes (Linz and Stepan 1996) in Eastern Europe (until

1989) and in Asia (e.g. China, North Korea, Vietnam and Laos), only few modern autocracies

can claim ideology-based legitimacy. The crisis of ideology resulting from the defeat of

fascism at the end of World War Two and the disintegration of communist rule in the Soviet

Union and Eastern Europe have reduced this foundation of authoritarian legitimation (Linz

2000, p. 36–37). Ideology-guided dictatorships that legitimise their actions by reference to an

all-inclusive utopian ideology (‘ideocracies’, cf. Piekalkiewicz and Penn 1995, Backes and

Kailitz 2012) are probably only a small fraction of all contemporary autocracies, whereas

most non-democratic regimes possess ‘mentalities’ instead of an ideological belief system

(Linz 2000, p. 162–63).5

History yields a number of modern cases of dictators legitimising their rule not necessarily

through ideology but by relying on traditional and charismatic justifications of their

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governments’ authority and power. For example, traditional authority is quite prevalent today in

the Middle East, because monarchies justify their authority based on lineage (Buttorff 2011,

p. 45). But even Arab monarchies have sought to build legitimacy and support around a combi-

nation of personal and patrimonial credentials and regime accomplishments (economic perform-

ance and patronage; cf. ibid.). Where authoritarian regimes cannot build sufficiently systematic

legitimacy (Backes 2013) based on ideology, tradition or the personal qualities of their leaders,

they are either forced to rely mostly on repression and/or cooptation in order to sustain power or

they must seek to justify their authority by providing public goods, thus using performance as an

alternative mode of legitimation. This, however, often leads them into what Samuel Huntington

(1991, p. 50) terms the ‘performance dilemma’: If a regime that bases its efforts to legitimise its

power on (economic) performance is not performing, its people will be dissatisfied, the regime

will be deemed incapable of governing appropriately and both the rulers and the political system

will lose legitimacy.6

But the legitimacy of an autocratic regime is undermined not only if it fails to deliver on its

promises, but also if it succeeds in achieving its purpose (ibid., p. 51): Economic development

presumably increases the capacity of a society to place demands upon a government. Individuals

are more likely to desire participation in government and have greater expectations for their gov-

ernment and its institutional framework (ibid.; see also Inglehart and Welzel 2005). Accord-

ingly, good economic performance actually weakens the developmentalist ‘authoritarian

bargain’ (Desai et al. 2009) by which citizens relinquish political rights for economic security.

The assumption that good performance does not protect against regime failure is supported by

the fact that even economically successful autocracies, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia

and Chile, experienced regime crisis and a transition to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s.

The contributions to this issue

The articles collected here emerged out of a workshop hosted at Heidelberg University’s Insti-

tute of Political Science and supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation in March 2012. The first

two contributions discuss conceptual and methodological issues in the study of authoritarianism

and autocratic government performance. The article by Michael Wahman, Jan Teorell and Axel

Hadenius introduces a modified and updated version of the authoritarianism regime type dataset

first introduced by Hadenius and Teorell (2007). The authors distinguish their approach from

alternative categorisations and datasets by pointing to what they see as the comparative advan-

tage of unpacking the heterogeneous character of electoral regimes and by providing a category

corresponding to the theoretically interesting class of ‘electoral authoritarian’ regimes. Based on

the discussion of the most important differences between their measurement of autocratic

regimes and the ones proposed by Geddes et al. (2012) and Cheibub et al. (2009), the authors

conclude that the choice of a particular dataset must be determined by the particular research

question. They also encourage researchers to use different datasets, for instance, in order to

improve the reliability of their own research findings. On one point, however, Wahman et al.

see an explicit advantage to their own approach: The inclusion of the category of the multiparty

authoritarian regime type makes their dataset the only viable alternative for scholars who are

interested in the increasingly important phenomenon of electoral authoritarian regimes.

In her discussion of the methodological issues in research on the performance of autocratic

regimes, Edeltraud Roller demonstrates that the researcher’s choice of dataset matters for his or

her results due to differences between their conceptualisations of autocratic regimes, their defi-

nitions and their criteria of classification, as well as differences in the measurement levels of the

three datasets mentioned above. A major finding is that ‘the level of complexity of indicators

matters for how many regimes of a specific type of autocratic regime are observed’ (Roller

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2013). While the definition and identification of monarchies is, unsurprisingly, a relatively

simple task resulting in high agreement between the three datasets, party regimes and military

regimes, in particular, appear more ambivalent in character (Roller 2013). As a consequence,

as Wahman et al. and Roller explain in their contributions to this issue, there are significant

differences in the classification of military regimes (see also Figure 2).

In addition, Roller’s article discusses measurement issues with respect to data on perform-

ance. Following previous studies, she concludes that there is ‘unequivocal empirical evidence’

of autocracies having lower data availability than democracies, and that data availability

increases with higher degrees of democracy and decreases with higher degrees of autocracy.

While data availability varies across subcategories of political performance, her findings

suggest that there is perhaps a general selection bias in favour of autocratic regimes with

some, albeit limited, democratic qualities, for instance, competitive authoritarian or (limited)

multiparty authoritarian regimes. This, in turn, may result in biased findings. Inspired by her dis-

cussion of Ross’s (2006) study of the social performance (i.e. infant and child mortality) of auto-

cratic and democratic regimes, we applied a similar method for the period 1960–2009,

differentiating not only between democracies and autocracies but also between the main types

of authoritarian regimes developed by GWF. That is, we simply counted the number of available

observations for three commonly used performance variables and plotted them against regime

types for this period. Thus, we are able to show that data availability also varies across types

of authoritarian regimes (see Table 3).

Our results in Table 3 suggest that while party regimes and monarchies have the highest per-

centages of missing observations (for infant mortality, see also McGuire’s article 2013), per-

sonal regimes exhibit the lowest share of omitted values, whereas military regimes display an

intermediate pattern of missing data. As Roller notes, this does not necessarily have a strong

effect on empirical findings, but given the probability of selection bias within the group of auto-

cratic regimes, scholars need to check whether his or her case sample is biased (Roller 2013).

The next three articles add to the literature on the patterns and causes of variations in the

political performance of autocracies by investigating whether different types of dictatorships

differ systematically in terms of social performance, ecological sustainability and the protection

Figure 2. Disagreement in codings of military regimes.Notes: Coding: CGV coding as military regime if regime ¼ ‘military dictatorship’; GWF coding as militaryregime if regime type ¼ ‘military’, ‘indirect military’ and ‘military–personal’; H&T coding according tovariable mil and military Regime if mil ¼ 1.Source: Dataset ‘Democracy and Dictatorships Revisited’ (CGV), Global Political Regimes Dataset (GWF)and Authoritarian Regimes Dataset (H&T).

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of property rights. Their findings complement other recent studies that provide empirical evi-

dence on the markedly different output and outcome performance profiles of autocratic

regimes in providing domestic security and in the management of internal conflict as well as

in their foreign policy performance, in the effectiveness of anti-corruption policies and in

their trade policies, etc. (see Table 4).

McGuire’s exploration of the association between political regime form (employing regime

data from Hadenius and Teorell 2007, Cheibub et al. 2009) and social performance, measured by

the infant mortality rate in 155–180 countries from 1972 to 2007, lends overall support to the

assumptions about public goods provisions in the selectorate theory proposed by Bueno de Mes-

quita et al. (2003): Democracies, which have the largest winning coalition, are found to have

lower infant mortality than authoritarian regimes. Furthermore, one-party regimes have lower

infant mortality than military or limited multiparty regimes, which have lower infant mortality

than monarchies. Moreover, his findings suggest that long-term democratic experience matters

more than short-term democratic practice to a country’s ability to achieve a low infant mortality

rate. Taken together with Gerring et al.’s (2005, p. 356) findings regarding the democratic

regime effect on growth, one might well conclude that long-term democracy leads to stronger

social and economic performance.

Similarly, the results of Wurster’s investigation of whether and under which circumstances

different types of autocracies perform better than democracies in terms of ecological sustainabil-

ity highlight the immense variation among dictatorships. The key distinction for his study is

between weak and strong environmental sustainability. Based on this differentiation and

employing regime data from the Democracy and Dictatorship dataset, his study reveals that

democracies perform significantly better than autocracies with regard to weak sustainability

but not where strong sustainability is concerned. In addition, presidential democracies

perform better than parliamentary and semi-presidential governments in both dimensions of sus-

tainability. These are novel contributions to the literature, which, so far, has suggested that the

‘democracy advantage’ (Halperin et al. 2004) in environmental policy has been largely driven by

parliamentary democracies (Frederiksson and Wollscheid 2007). Another key finding from his

Table 3. Missing and non-missing observations in democracies and different types of autocracies for theperiod 1960–2009.

Regimetype

Income per capita Infant mortality Child mortality

Non-missingvalues

Missingvalues

Non-missingvalues

Missingvalues

Non-missingvalues

Missingvalues

Democracy 2614 49 2604 59 108 2555% 98.2 1.8 97.8 2.2 4.1 95.9Military 449 73 505 17 9 513% 86 14 96.7 3.3 1.7 98.3Monarchy 327 109 411 25 11 425% 75 25 94.3 5.7 2.5 97.5Other 144 9 149 4 5 148% 94.1 5.9 97.4 2.6 3.3 96.7Party 1667 278 1607 338 58 1887% 85.7 14.3 82.6 17.4 3 97personal 957 62 987 32 50 969% 93.9 6.1 96.9 3.1 4.9 95.1

Sources: Regime data from Geddes et al. (2012); data for infant mortality and child mortality from World Bank andincome data from Penn World Table.

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Table 4. Selected empirical findings on the policy output and outcome performance of different forms ofdictatorship.

Category Research question Findings Dataset

Policy output performance

Social welfareexpenditures (Eiblet al. 2012)

Does social welfare provisiondiffer within the set ofauthoritarian regimes?

Social welfare provision differsquite considerably within the setof authoritarian regimes:Monarchies and to a lesser degreemilitary regimes do not increasesocial spending in the presence ofpositive economic growth.Constituencies within partyregimes and within personalistregimes benefit from positivegrowth rates

GWF

Military expenditures(Bove and Brauner2011)

Are there systematic differences inmilitary expenditures amongstdifferent forms of dictatorships?

Military and personalist regimeshave respectively the highest andlowest levels of military spendingamong authoritarian regimes;monarchies and single-partyregimes display intermediatepatterns of spending

GWF

Effects of internationalsanctions on publicspending (Escriba-Folch 2012)

Are there systematic differences inhow international sanctionsaffect authoritarian rulers’decisions concerning repressionand public spendingcomposition?

Single-party regimes, when targetedby sanctions, increase spendingon subsidies and transfers whichlargely benefit their keyconstituencies, whereas militaryregimes increase theirexpenditures on goods andservices, which include militaryequipment and soldiers’ andofficers’ wages. Conversely,personalist regimes targeted bysanctions reduce spending in allcategories and thus increaserepression more than otherautocracies

GWF

Policy outcome performance

Social performance(McGuire 2013)

Does the regime type play a role ininfant mortality?

Long-term democratic experience isassociated significantly withlower infant mortality. One-partyregimes are associated with thelowest infant mortality rates,followed by limited multipartyregimes, military regimes andmonarchies

APSR

Ecological sustainability(Wurster 2013)

Does regime type play a role inecological sustainabilityperformance?

Presidential democracies performbetter than parliamentary andsemi-presidential systems onweak and strong sustainability.With regard to weaksustainability, monarchies andcivilian dictatorships are superiorto military regimes. With regardto strong sustainability,monarchies are least performing;civilian autocracies achievesignificantly better results than themean of the democratic states

DD

(Continued)

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analysis is the significant differences across different forms of autocratic regimes. His empirical

results suggest that while monarchies and civilian dictatorships have the best results in weak sus-

tainability among authoritarian regimes, monarchies have the worst performance with regard to

strong sustainability while civilian dictatorships perform pretty well. In regard to the current

debate on the possible superiority of authoritarian modes of environmental governance, his

Table 4. Continued.

Category Research question Findings Dataset

Property rights (Knutsenand Fjelde 2013)

Do types of dictatorships differsystematically when it comes tothe protection of propertyrights?

Monarchies have significantlystronger property rights protectionthan military regimes, one-partyregimes, multiparty regimes and‘other dictatorships’

APSR

Non-robust results indicate thatautocratic monarchies protectproperty rights more strongly thandemocracies

Economic growth(Knutsen and Fjelde2012)

Do different types of dictatorshipsdiffer systematically when itcomes to economic growth?

There are no significant differencesbetween economic growth rates inone-party dictatorships anddemocracies when controlling forother (structural) variables.Furthermore, ‘monarchy’ and‘other dictatorships’ havesignificantly lower economicgrowth rates than one-partyautocracies

HT

Trade policy (Hankla andKuthy 2011)

What effect do variousauthoritarian regime types haveon national trade policies?

Multiparty, and to a lesser extentsingle party, autocracies tend toprefer more open trade policiesthan non-party (oftenpersonalistic) dictatorships,monarchies and military juntas

APSRandGPRS

Foreign policy (Weeks2012)

Do domestic institutions affectautocratic leaders’ decisions toinitiate military conflicts?

Not only are there significantdifferences between democracies,on the one hand, and juntas,bosses and strongmen, on theother hand, but there are alsosignificant differences amongauthoritarian regime types

GPRS

Domestic conflictmanagement (Fjelde2010)

Do dictatorial institutions influencethe risk of civil conflict?

Military regimes and multipartyelectoral autocracies run a higherrisk of armed conflict than single-party authoritarian regimes,which on the other hand seem tohave an institutional set-up thatmakes them particularly resilientto armed challenges to theirauthority

APSR

Corruption (Chang andGolden 2010)

Do authoritarian politicalinstitutions influence the level ofcorruption?

Personalistic and personalistic–hybrid regimes are more prone tocorruption than single-party andmilitary regimes, and rulers whoexpect to remain in power forlonger are less corrupt

GPRS

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findings generally support the scepticism concerning the effectiveness of ‘authoritarian environ-

mentalism’ as a non-participatory approach to environmental policy-making and implemen-

tation in the face of severe ecological challenges (see also Beeson 2009, Gilley 2012).

The third article by Knutsen and Fjelde also testifies to the immense variation between differ-

ent types of dictatorships. Across the regime types identified by Hadenius and Teorell, monar-

chies have significantly stronger property rights protection than military regimes, one-party

regimes, multiparty regimes and ‘other dictatorships’. In addition, the statistical evidence

suggests that autocratic monarchies may protect property rights more strongly than democracies,

although these results are non-robust. In contrast to previous studies (cf. Li 2009, Gehlbach and

Keefer 2011, 2012) which focused on dictatorial institutions as constraints, they propose an

explanation of their results that draws from Olson’s (1993) observation on the importance of

a ruler’s time horizon for the protection of property. Dictatorial institutions create different

incentives for protecting property and enforce contracts by influencing the time horizon of the

ruling elite. Monarchies, they explain, perform better at property rights protection because

rulers have a longer time horizon and certainty about the composition of the regime elite and

the future of their dynasty. Thus, kings and queens have a weaker incentive to expropriate prop-

erty for short-term gain (see also Wright 2008b, Albertus and Menaldo 2012).

In the final contribution to this special issue, Tanneberg and his collaborators examine whether

different forms of autocracy vary in their ability to cope with economic stress. The authors intro-

duce a broader theoretical framework that comprises legitimation, repression and cooptation as the

three main regime-sustaining strategies (see also Gerschewski 2013). Looking then at the effects of

economic growth on the persistence of autocracies, using a sample of 160 autocratic regimes in

110 countries over the period 1981–2008, their main finding is that all forms of dictatorship

are equally vulnerable to economic downturns. In addition, they find that higher GDP per

capita stabilises the regime, which is certainly a provocative finding, given the debate about the

‘performance dilemma’ of autocratic rule and previous controversial debates about the association

between per capital income and the probability of democracy (see Przeworski et al. 2000, Boix and

Stokes 2003, Boix 2011). Looking then at autocrats’ tools for survival, the authors find that coop-

tation and what they call ‘low intensity repression’ reduces the probability of regime breakdown.

High intensity repression, on the other hand, is counterproductive for the autocrat and increases the

likelihood of regime collapse. Thus, dictators are better able to cope with economic crises when

they can engage in cooptation and/or more subtle forms of repression. In contrast, autocrats

who engage more in high intensity repression may actively contribute to the probability of their

own downfall by undermining efforts to legitimate their rule.7

In lieu of a conclusion

The articles in this issue give evidence of the importance of differentiating between subtypes of

autocracy when analysing the political performance of autocracies across different regimes.

While many issues remain incompletely resolved, the contributions provide evidence that different

forms of autocracy differ in regard to their political performance. In addition, they point to the

necessity of not narrowing the debate on the policy differences between autocracies and democra-

cies to their effectiveness in providing economic growth. Rather, there are pronounced differences

in autocracies’ environmental and social performance, and in their ability to protect property.

This is also relevant for the present debate on whether alternative authoritarian governance

models might outperform democracies in the process of development. This discussion has

recently gained renewed attention, mostly as a consequence of two developments. First of all

there has been a debate about the exhaustion of the democratic momentum in a considerable

number of new democracies whose performance seems inferior compared to the impressive

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results of economic development in authoritarian countries such as China, Singapore and

Vietnam. Secondly, there are increasing concerns about democratic quality and performance

in Western democracies, about their transition towards ‘post democracy’ (Crouch 2004) and

about the possible dilemma of the simultaneous denationalisation of political decision-making

and the increasing expectations of citizens, which might result in a critical loss of legitimacy

(cf. Schmidt 2010). In addition, the present financial and economic crisis that originated in

the western democracies in 2008 and the economic rise of some capitalist autocracies

(Deudney and Ikenberry 2009) have rekindled the debate about the ‘return of authoritarian

great powers’ (Gat 2007) and the rise of a new ideological fault line in the international politics

of the early twenty-first century.

The contributions in this special issue, of course, cannot solve these issues. The aim of this

special issue has been more modest. It attempts to explore whether there are systematic differ-

ences in policy performance across different types of autocracies and in different policy areas.

Clearly, autocracies differ substantially not only in terms of who rules and how they rule, a fact

that is widely acknowledged in the present literature, but also in regard to their policy perform-

ance. We believe that this special issue successfully demonstrates that autocracies should not be

treated as a single category but should be unpacked into different types and subcategories when

analysing their policy performance. We hope that readers will find this special issue useful and

timely in this respect.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Mark Beeson for the excellent cooperation and friendly exchanges in the prep-

aration of this special issue. They also thank the authors and the anonymous reviewers for their

energy and devotion to the project and are especially grateful for the financial support of the Fritz

Thyssen Foundation in Cologne that allowed them to host a workshop at Heidelberg University

in March 2012, for which most of the papers in this special issue were prepared. The discussions

with Manfred G. Schmidt, Ronald Wintrobe, Steffen Kailitz, Jennifer Gandhi, Andreas Schedler,

Jeffrey Pickering, Oliver Schlumberger, Julia Bader, Jorg Faust and Jeff Haynes at the workshop

provided invaluable feedback and new perspectives on the ideas discussed in this issue. Their

generous intellectual support is greatly appreciated.

Notes

1. We use ‘autocracy’ as a general term for all forms of non-democratic regimes.2. However, within the various categories of regime types, persistence varies considerably. For single-

party regimes see Smith (2005); for military regimes see Croissant (2013b).3. Cooptation, of course, is another alternative to force. In addition, it is important to note that in author-

itarian regimes, legitimation, cooptation and repression need to be conceptualised as interrelated, inter-acting and mutually interdependent strategies of authoritarian regime survival (see Merkel et al. 2013,Tanneberg et al. 2013).

4. See Backes (2013) and Kailitz (2013) rediscovering the importance of power legitimation for the oper-ation and consolidation of autocratic rule.

5. For the role of communist ideology as a source of legitimacy in present-day China, North Korea andVietnam, see Holbig (2013), Frank and Park (2012) and Hiep (2012).

6. This is not to say that authoritarian regimes cannot survive despite poor performance. There areexamples of past and present dictatorships that survived despite a dramatic deterioration of the economicsituation (e.g. North Korea in the 1990s and Zimbabwe in the 2000s). In this regard, Greene (2010)shows that dominant parties endure, despite poor economic performance, when they can politicisepublic resources. Clearly this has been the case in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, where expropriation of landfrom white farmers has actually strengthened the government’s ability to use the politics of patronage,cooptation and coercion. In North Korea, the political leader’s decision not to follow the Chinese path to

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economic reforms means that the regime kept total control over public resources, which, among otherthings, allowed the government to starve out any potential source of articulated dissent.

7. In trying to link the persistence of authoritarian rule to the concept of legitimacy, we are confronted withthe problem that it is extremely difficult to measure regime legitimacy in dictatorships since authoritar-ian leaders typically impose severe limitations on independent scholarship that seeks to measure the pol-itical attitudes of the citizenry (Hoffmann 2011, p. 6). For this reason, studies on regime legitimacy inauthoritarian countries often do not directly measure either a given population’s actual attitudes to aspecific regime or the degree to which authoritarian regimes have gained legitimacy among the citi-zenry, but instead use indirect measures, such as the frequency of demonstrations and public mass pro-tests, or performance data, assuming that better performance leads to higher support. Although it iscorrect that a high level of anti-government mass mobilisation indicates a crisis of legitimation forthe authoritarian political regime, the reverse is not necessarily true: low levels of mass protest mobil-isation can either indicate strong regime legitimacy or the credible and effective threat of repression by agovernment that is aware of its lack of legitimacy among its people.

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