The provision of welfare services can be a crucial part of a legitimation strategy not only for democratic countries but also for authoritarian regimes such as China or the Arab monarchies. To make their rule durable autocrats are forced to balance their far reaching restrictions of civil liberties with the promise of social security. However it is a scientific puzzle in what way and to what extend they are doing so. According to the current scientific debate (Knutsen and Rasmussen 2014) we assume that, depending on the autocratic regime subtype (Kailitz 2013), the level of basic social insurance may differ considerably. While for the selectorate theory (Bueno Mesquita et al. 2003) size of the “selectorate” and of the “winning coalition” makes a crucial difference we start from a broader theoretical concept that also takes ideological components into account. We examine in our article the relationship between autocratic regime legitimation and social policy outcomes in the field of basic insurance (measured by the access to water and sanitation, child mortality and the proportion of the population living under extreme poverty) for (up to) 116 autocracies in the period 1960 to 2010. We can show that the social profiles of different autocratic regime subtypes indeed differ substantially. While military dictatorships perform very badly, electoral autocracies provide more basic social insurance than other autocratic subtypes. Contrary to the expectations of selectorate theory communist ideocracies perform much better than single party regimes and monarchies much better than personalist autocracies. This can be explained looking at the specific strategies of legitimation of these autocratic regime types.
Bueno Mesquita, Bruce, James D. Morrow, Randolph M. Siverson, and Alastair Smith. 2003. The Logic of Political Survival. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kailitz, Steffen. 2013. "Classifying Political Regimes Revisited: Legitimation and Durability." Democratization 20 (1):38-59.
Knutsen, Carl Henrik, and Magnus Rasmussen. 2014. "The Autocratic Welfare State: Resource Distribution, Credible Commitments and Political Survival." Oslo/Aarhus: University of Oslo/University Aarhus.
