Welfare states in authoritarian regimes exhibit at least as much variation as their democratic counterparts, yet have thus far not been subject to detailed academic scrutiny. This paper takes on the task to compare the origins of authoritarian welfare states and proposes a theoretical framework that explains why some authoritarian states build much more extensive and larger welfare regimes than others. Based on qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), this paper proposes a measure of the welfare effort authoritarian regimes undertake. It is argued that this composite measure of social spending data is a better foundation for analysing the considerable cross-country variation of authoritarian welfare states than the analysis of cross-sectional spending data over time. Besides, the paper outlines a theoretical framework to explain the variation of welfare efforts in authoritarian regimes, which broadly conceptualises welfare state policies as a means of co-opting societal actors. Combining the welfare state and authoritarianism literature, the proposed framework emphasises the importance of critical alignments of societal actors at the onset of regime formation and highlights three necessary and jointly sufficient causal conditions: first, the relative level of development; second, the strength of the demand for welfare policies; third, the varying incentive of authoritarian regimes to co-opt.
