Regime Institutionalization & Public Goods Provision in Autocracies

• In Event: Poster Session: Democracy and Autocracy

Abstract

A key finding in the recent literature on autocracies is that regime institutionalization leads to longer rule and improves stability by facilitating authoritarian power sharing, reducing the likelihood of coup attempts, and increasing the chance of withstanding leadership transfers. This line of work and the authoritarian literature more broadly tend to place an overemphasis on regime durability. Regimes such as personalistic ones that rely on charismatic legitimacy and repression are not necessarily less durable, or long-lasting, than those with institutionalized processes. Equally resilient autocracies can both have little to no improvement to general welfare (e.g., North Korea) and robust economic performance, significant poverty reduction, and an improved standard of living for their citizens (e.g., China and Vietnam). While they might be similarly durable, why do some autocracies provide more carrots than others? As such, moving beyond regime durability, I am interested in the effects of institutionalization on key outcomes such as a regime’s ability to achieve its development goals or improve its citizens’ standard of living. My theory is that regimes with institutionally constrained autocrats have better outcomes in terms of public goods provision and/or service delivery. I test this argument using panel data from 1960-2018 on levels of regime institutionalization and equal resource distribution among autocracies and find some preliminary empirical evidence in support of this theory.

Author

• Trung-Anh Nguyen, Duke University