Modernization: Does it have an impact on the survival of autocracies?

One of the main questions in comparative politics is: What makes political regimes rise, endure, and fall? This discussion has lately focused on the question whether the observed close relationship between levels of economic development and the incidence of democratic regimes is due to democracies being more likely to emerge or only more likely to survive in wealthier countries. We shift the focus on autocracies and show that there is a largely neglected part to the answer why there is an observable close relation between democracy and modernization. Using data covering the time span from 1945 to 2010, we find through logistic regression analysis and event history analysis that the level of economic development does affect the endurance of democracies but not of autocracies. In more detail, our results indicate that the survival of any of the six types of autocracies (i.e. ruling monarchies, communist ideocracies, military autocracies, personalist autocracies, electoral autocracies, one party autocracies) is not influenced by the country’s economic development. In other words, regardless of the type, poor or rich autocracies have an equal chance to fall. Our result contradicts some key findings in the literature. For one it contradicts Przeworski and Limongis seminal finding that dictatorships are more likely to survive in wealthy countries. Probably, even more importantly, it also contradicts one of the main thesis of the original modernization theory; that is the wealthier a dictatorship becomes the more likely a transition (to democracy) becomes.