Authoritarianism, democracy and development
Tim Kelsall – 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.
The paper finds that knowing whether a state is authoritarian or democratic does not help us predict whether or not it will be developmental. Authoritarian regimes have been responsible 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.
[Read blog by the author and download paper]
