The Politics of Authoritarian Social Welfare Provision

• In Event: Outputs of Autocracy: Policy and Inequality

Abstract

One of the most widely accepted scholarly findings about welfare states is that democracies are more likely to have generous welfare states than autocracies. In democracies, voter preferences and interest group pressure create incentives for elected leaders to adopt generous social welfare policies. Social welfare provision in autocracies is limited, then, because authoritarian governments are not accountable to voters and repress interest groups. Yet contrary to theoretical expectations, some authoritarian regimes do adopt comprehensive social programs that dramatically improve the well-being of their citizens. In this paper, I advance an argument to explain the emergence of these generous authoritarian welfare states. I argue that generous authoritarian welfare states have emerged in countries where mass mobilizing parties (MMPs) and infrastructurally powerful states were present during the initial periods of authoritarian regime formation. MMPs are political parties that emerged during colonial or imperial rule and that sought to fundamentally transform the established political order. These transformative goals required them to generate widespread support in societies that were deeply differentiated along ethnic, racial, and sectarian lines. To mobilize citizens behind the party’s transformational goals, MMPs sought to develop new national solidarities to supplant preexisting sectional identities. This, in turn, required regime-building MMPs to replace communal networks of social support with alternative, national systems of solidarity. To achieve this goal of cultivating national solidarity, MMPs adopted generous social programs that built a substantive bond between citizens and national parties. The development of generous authoritarian welfare states, however, is conditioned by the level of infrastructural power of the state. Building a state with high infrastructural power enabled regime-building MMPs to (1) raise revenues to finance social welfare policies, (2) acquire bureaucratic capacity to design and implement these policies, and (3) gain autonomy from social groups that might oppose social welfare provision. To test these arguments, I construct an original database of social welfare policies in developing countries, autocratic MMPs, and several measures of infrastructural power.

Author

• Ibrahim Oker, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities