In the literature of welfare state, social policy programs are considered as either mechanisms that provide social insurance against potential risks such as job loss or illness or as tools for progressive redistribution. In authoritarian regimes however, autocrats use social policies also as a strategic tool to secure their position in power. By distributing rents or by providing policy concessions to critical groups, authoritarian leaders aim to increase political support and reduce the probability of being overthrown. Hence, we should expect authoritarian regimes that rely on different political support to implement different social policies in order to secure their power.
The research on authoritarian welfare state has always been a blind spot in the welfare state literature. Major contributions have shed light either on the overall trend of social policy expenditures in authoritarian regimes or on specific sectors such as pension, education and health care. Yet, most of those studies did not investigate the determinants of different models of authoritarian welfare system. Do same authoritarian regimes converge towards a similar welfare state system? And if they do so, why?
Built upon the typology of authoritarian regimes elaborated by Barbara Geddes in 1999, the paper provides an in-depth analysis of the relationships between authoritarian regime type and welfare systems. In particular, the author expects to find evidence that same types of authoritarian regime converge towards a similar welfare state system. In order to test this hypothesis however, the author controls for other possible intervening variables such as the level of natural resource endowment and the state capacity. The case selection is made up of four personalist authoritarian regimes of Central Asia - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan. Those countries are nowadays largely marginalized even if there is a growing literature on post-communist welfare state. From an historical background, they emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union and thus, they inherited features of the Soviet welfare system. Moreover, the process of liberalization that they have gone through has been quite similar among all Central Asian countries. Therefore, the case selection is motivated by the ‘most similar cases’ strategy. The empirical analysis rests upon quantitative data retrieved from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund database. Surprisingly, the findings reject the hypothesis of a policy converge for the same types of authoritarian regime. Yet, the results trigger further reflections on the role played by other factors such as natural resource endowment and state capacity.
