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Welfare Spending in Dictatorship: Who Spends the Most?

Sat, September 2, 2:00 to 3:30pm, Parc 55, Cyril Magnin III

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the delivery of public services to citizens in dictatorships. We seek to explain why some dictatorships enhance the welfare of citizens while others do the opposite. We expect to find that different kinds of dictatorship use different strategies to consolidate their rule. Different authoritarian regimes have different support-groups, which they need to compensate and redistribute to. We hypothesize that party-based dictatorships spend more on welfare than personalist or military dictatorships in order to maintain the support base because the welfare spending will be focused on redistribution to the middle class and the urban coalition that support the party while personal dictatorship or military dictatorship can focus their resources to their cronies or other officers. We test how different types of dictatorship result in different welfare spending with the data on categories of dictatorship and welfare outcomes such as infant mortality rate, women death rate on birth, energy subsidies, and vaccination rate in non-democracies. We argue that if dictatorships find a way to provide sound welfare programs, we expect to see longer lifespan of the regime.

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