Performance and persistence of autocracies in comparison: introducing issues and perspectives

Abstract

Authoritarianism research has evolved into one of the fastest growing areas in comparative politics and political economy. However, 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. In this article we introduce the individual contributions to this special issue and summarize their findings with regard to three core research questions: What are the differences between autocracies and democracies, as well as between different forms of authoritarian regimes, with regard to their outcome performance in selected policy fields? Does policy performance matter for the persistence of authoritarian rule? How can we conceptualize different types of autocratic regimes and do differences in the availability of performance data matter for the results of empirical studies comparing democracies and autocracies or different types of non-democratic regimes?

Keywords:

• autocracy
• dictatorship
• political performance
• regime persistence
• policy outcomes

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Mark Beeson for the excellent cooperation and friendly exchanges in the preparation 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, Jörg 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

We use ‘autocracy’ as a general term for all forms of non-democratic regimes.

However, within the various categories of regime types, persistence varies considerably. For single-party regimes see Smith (2005); for military regimes see Croissant (2013b).

Cooptation, of course, is another alternative to force. In addition, it is important to note that in authoritarian regimes, legitimation, cooptation and repression need to be conceptualised as interrelated, interacting and mutually interdependent strategies of authoritarian regime survival (see Merkel et al. 2013, Tanneberg et al. 2013).

See Backes (2013) and Kailitz (2013) rediscovering the importance of power legitimation for the operation and consolidation of autocratic rule.

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

This is not to say that authoritarian regimes cannot survive despite poor performance. There are examples of past and present dictatorships that survived despite a dramatic deterioration of the economic situation (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 politicise public resources. Clearly this has been the case in Mugabe's Zimbabwe, where expropriation of land from 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 economic reforms means that the regime kept total control over public resources, which, among other things, allowed the government to starve out any potential source of articulated dissent.

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aurel Croissant

Aurel Croissant is Professor at the Institute of Political Science, Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg, Germany. Email: [email protected]

Stefan Wurster

Stefan Wurster is Research Associate at the Institute of Political Science, Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg, Germany. Email: [email protected]