Democracy Versus Autocracy Comparison

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Democracy versus Autocracy Comparison Comparison Democracy Autocracy Element Meaning of From Greek – Demos means From Greek – Auto means “self” and Kratos Term “people” and Kratos means “power” means “power” or “authority”. or “authority”. Government The power and strength of the One person or group holds all the power, government are given to it by the without the participation, or sometimes even people. the consent, of the people. Freedoms & Identified in country’s . Determined by person or group in power Rights constitution and created by laws. Often severely restrictive to suppress opponents. Vary based on religion, sex, status etc. Books, magazines censored by government . Ability to express one’s point of view, to assemble etc. often limited. Examples United States Cuba – dictatorship run by a single individual Iraq Denmark – monarchy run by a King England Iran – dictatorship run by religious group Poland China – dictatorship run by Communist party Italy Venezuela – dictatorship run by a single individual Constitution Document that describes how a Similar but can be easily changed or simply government is organized and the ignored by those in power to suit their needs. basic laws of the country. Usually requires a large majority of the people to change. How Leaders Elected (by voting) by the people Sometimes by force - one group overthrows Come to to hold office for a specific another group. Power length of time. Sometimes leadership is “inherited” as in case of: . governments headed by king or queen and their sons or daughters become king or queen . dictatorship where dictator picks his successor – often a family member. .

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Making Autocracy Work
∗ Making Autocracy Work Timothy Besley Masayuki Kudamatsu LSE and CIFAR LSE The Suntory Centre Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines London School of Economics and Political Science Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE DEDPS 48 May 2007 Tel: (020) 7955 6674 ∗ The first author is grateful for support from CIFAR. The authors received much helpful feedback from members of the Institutions, Organizations and Growth program of CIFAR to which a preliminary version of this paper was presented. Useful comments from Madhav Aney, Fernando Aragon, Peter Evans, Gabriel Leon, Adam Przeworski, Konstantin Sonin, and Guido Tabellini are gratefully acknowledged. Abstract One of the key goals of political economy is to understand how institutional arrangements shape policy outcomes. This paper studies a comparatively neglected aspect of this - the forces that shape heterogeneous performance of autocracies. The paper develops a simple theoretical model of accountability in the absence of regularized elections. Leadership turnover is managed by a selectorate - a group of individuals on whom the leader depends to hold onto power. Good policy is institutionalized when the selectorate removes poorly performing leaders from office. This requires that the selectorate’s hold on power is not too dependent on a specific leader being in office. The paper looks empirically at spells of autocracy to establish cases where it has been successful according to various objective criteria. We use these case studies to identify the selectorate in specific instances of successful autocracy. We also show that, consistent with the theory, leadership turnover in successful autocracies is higher than in unsuccessful autocracies. Finally, we show by exploiting leadership deaths from natural causes that successful autocracies appear to have found ways for selectorates to nominate successors without losing power - a feature which is also consistent with the theoretical approach.
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