The Myth of Authoritarian Efficiency
When it comes to getting stuff done, democracies win every time.
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A specter haunts debates about governance: the idea of benevolent and efficient dictatorship. Where democratic leaders haggle, delay, and pander, the authoritarian ruler simply acts. Where elected governments bend to lobbyists and electoral cycles, a dictator is in for the long haul. This vision—or autocratic temptation, if you will—has been popular as far back as we have documented political theory, and it still has plenty of champions today. Beijing officials invoke it to explain the rise of China; climate activists to argue that the planetary emergency demands that we put democracy on pause; populists to suggest that current institutions are broken and that a fresh start and setting the popular will free requires a firm and unchecked hand.
The academic literature has supplied these critics with plentiful ammunition. Books with ominous titles like Against Democracy, Democracy: The God that Failed, and Democracy Kills have found audiences well beyond university campuses. The charges echo those we find all the way back to Plato: democracies are short-sighted, paralyzed by special interests, prone to electing demagogues, and incapable of making the sacrifices that the challenges of the day require.
However, a large body of studies of how democracies and autocracies actually perform across regions, over centuries, and in domains ranging from economic growth to military effectiveness to environmental protection have questioned this story. They do not show autocracies to be superior—on the contrary, the autocratic temptation is, in most domains, a mirage, or even a trap. Not only are democracies morally preferable because they recognize the political equity and dignity of citizens; they also tend to work better.
Countries that successfully consolidate free and fair elections face substantially lower risks of civil war and domestic political violence than authoritarian states. Democracy, by design, offers losers something: the prospect of future victory at the polls, legal channels for dissent, protection from persecution. Citizens who can kick out the opposition at elections are less inclined to take to the streets with weapons.
The military dimension is also revealing. At least since the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who admired oligarchic Sparta’s discipline over democratic Athens, democracies have been accused of weakness in warfare. This charge resurfaced in the 1930s, when authoritarian Germany and Japan ran roughshod over unprepared democracies, and again during the first three decades of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union seemed to outmaneuver its wealthier Western rivals. Yet the long-term record is unambiguous: since 1815, democracies have won more than 80 percent of the wars they have fought. They win not in spite of their openness but because of it. Elected governments have more legitimacy; they are better placed to ask citizens to make hard sacrifices. Democratic alliances, rooted in shared values, are more durable and credible than autocratic alliances. And no two modern democracies have ever gone to war with each other—a remarkable empirical regularity, an iron law, that has held for two centuries.
Vladimir Putin’s catastrophic miscalculation in Ukraine illustrates this. Putin appears to have made a bet that a divided, energy-dependent West would fracture under pressure; that Ukrainian society, lacking the coercive power and will of a dictatorship headed by a strongman, would collapse quickly; and that his own military was far stronger than it proved to be when put to the test. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s citizen-soldiers have fought with a tenacity and creativity that has confounded nearly every prior assessment, and support from other democracies has helped them make their brave stand against the aggressor. An autocrat’s epistemic isolation, it turns out, is not a strategic asset—it is a liability.
An even more seductive version of autocratic temptation is economical. Authoritarian leaders, the argument goes, are unencumbered by electoral cycles, and thus can make investments that democracies are unable to but which are necessary for development. They can suppress wage demands, override property rights when needed, and redirect capital toward the sectors that create growth. Democratic politicians, by contrast, must constantly placate voters and campaign donors, skewing policy toward immediate gratification.
There is something to this argument—but much less than its proponents claim, and the authoritarian alternative is hardly perfect in its economic results. Democratic accountability, for all the short-termism it supposedly encourages, creates powerful incentives to invest in public health, education, and physical infrastructure. Citizens who benefit from these things tend to reward the governments that provide them. Democratic institutions protect property rights in a way that encourages the private investment that drives productivity. And the open circulation of ideas across universities, a free press, and competitive markets is not a distraction from growth but one of its primary engines. Studies show that, on average, democracies enjoy a modest but robust long-run growth advantage over autocracies, and that this advantage strengthens with the quality and longevity of democratic institutions.
More telling than average growth rates, however, is the frequency with which disasters strike. Unchecked political authority not merely fails to deliver growth; rather, it periodically produces catastrophes. Mao’s Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1962 killed tens of millions through an entirely man-made famine, a consequence of ideological fantasy insulated from the real world. The Soviet collectivization campaign produced similar horrors two decades earlier. Comparable disasters in democratic states are virtually unknown—not necessarily because democratic leaders are wiser or more virtuous, but because they face institutional constraints and public scrutiny that make disastrous policies impossible to sustain.
The most advanced economies in the world are democracies. The handful of countries that have joined the ranks of wealthy, high-technology societies over the past century, including South Korea, Taiwan, Israel, and Ireland, made at least the final leap under democratic governance. Singapore is the sole exception to this rule. Autocratic regimes can mobilize resources to achieve middle-income status, as China has done. But the transition to a knowledge-based economy requires the rule of law, the protection of intellectual property, and the freedom to challenge received wisdom—all of which are systematically undermined under dictatorship.
Climate change has given the autocratic temptation a new lease on life. The argument is compelling: effective climate policy requires incurring costs now for the benefit of future generations who cannot vote, overriding vested interests that are well-organized and politically powerful, and maintaining consistent policy over periods that exceed any electoral cycle. Addressing climate change might therefore require setting democracy aside. Others, meanwhile, have proposed nurturing a class of enlightened eco-authoritarian technocrats.
However, this appeal to authoritarian governance relies on a fundamental confusion between the capacity to decide on policies and the likelihood of adopting and implementing good ones. Authoritarian regimes can certainly move fast when they decide to. But choosing to address climate change rather than subsidizing fossil fuels is precisely what they frequently fail to do. They also regularly lie about emissions.
Freedom of expression is not in fact an obstacle to climate action; it is what makes it possible. Green movements need to organize, publicize, and campaign. Independent scientists must have the freedom to publish findings that inconvenience powerful interests. International environmental agreements require governments that can credibly commit. Overall, democracies, especially high-quality ones with a capable state apparatus, outperform their authoritarian counterparts, whether on greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, water pollution, or soil erosion.
The eco-authoritarian chimera also sidesteps the tough but unavoidable question of how the virtuous technocrats are to be selected and constrained—the classical problem of who will guard the guardians, which no eco-authoritarian has satisfactorily answered. Concentrated power that happens to be used wisely for climate issues can easily be turned toward repression, ethnic persecution, or foreign-policy adventurism. Absent democratic accountability, there is no mechanism for ensuring it remains focused on the planet’s welfare without neglecting or undermining other things we cherish.
China is the principal exhibit in every contemporary case for autocratic governance. China’s growth over the past four decades has been spectacular. It has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, building infrastructure at a pace democratic countries are unable to match. To many observers, China is decisive proof that the authoritarian model outperforms.
Look at the record more carefully, however, and a different picture emerges. To begin with, China’s official growth figures are among the most manipulated of any major economy. Satellite-based measures of night-time light emissions, which correlate closely with actual economic activity, indicate that Beijing’s statistics overstate both the pace and the scale of growth.
Context also matters. In 1949, China, Taiwan, South Korea, and North Korea were all equally poor. Today, South Korea and Taiwan are consolidated democracies with per capita incomes substantially higher than China’s. North Korea, on the other hand, offers the unvarnished control case. Communist one-party rule without economic reform has produced one of the most disastrous economic and humanitarian records of the modern era. China’s own pre-reform decades under Mao were characterized not by rapid development but by stagnation punctuated by ideologically driven disasters.
China’s environmental record, meanwhile, questions the case that autocracy handles long-term challenges better. Decades of growth have left cities choked with smog, rivers contaminated across large regions, and groundwater depleted in ways that will come back to haunt future generations. China’s domestic security spending now exceeds what the country spends on its military—a striking indicator of the regime’s lack of trust in its own population.
The handling of Covid-19 is also instructive. China’s initial containment, characterized by rapid hospital construction, mass testing, and strict lockdowns, impressed many Western observers. What is less often noted is that China’s initial response also included the active suppression of early warnings and the punishment of those who tried to alert the public, delays that cost not only China but the whole world dearly. And when Beijing eventually abandoned its zero-Covid policies in early 2023, almost a year after other countries had lifted most of their measures, it did so abruptly and without preparation, exposing a population with minimal acquired immunity to a wave of mass infection. The government had optimized for control rather than for public health, and when control became untenable, it had no alternative to letting the virus spread unchecked. South Korea and Taiwan, facing similar epidemiological conditions as democracies, managed to handle the crisis without the brutality or the catastrophic crescendo.
Taken together, China’s rise not only reflects a historically specific combination of starting conditions, reform choices, and global economic integration that is not easily replicable; it has also generated huge costs, in inequality, in environmental damage, and in political repression, that official accounts systematically obscure.
Democracies have real and well-documented failings. They are often slow. They are susceptible to capture by organized interests. They sometimes elect leaders who undermine the very institutions that gave them power. None of this should be ignored. But the relevant comparison is not between actually existing democracies and some imagined model of virtuous authoritarian efficiency. It is between actually existing democracies and actually existing autocracies. By that yardstick, the democratic record is substantially better.
Niccolò Machiavelli is not the first thinker who comes to mind when defending democratic governance. But the Florentine cynic recognized something like this five centuries ago. Contrasting republics with principalities, Machiavelli concluded that “fewer errors will be seen in the people than in the prince—and those lesser and having greater remedies.” The mechanism he identified was not virtue but accountability—the capacity of a political system to detect its mistakes and correct them.
That capacity is precisely what democratic institutions are designed to provide. At a time when open societies face serious pressure from within and without, the temptation to admire their alternatives is understandable. But admiration is not a sound foundation for political judgment, especially not when it is based on a selective reading of the evidence. The autocratic temptation promises fortitude and efficiency—but too often, it only produces chaos and mismanagement; and, occasionally, it delivers disaster.
Jørgen Møller and Svend-Erik Skaaning are both professors of political science at Aarhus University.
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A lovely and thoughtful essay.
While I mostly agree, The First World War looks to me a War among democracies. Both Germany and Austria were parlamentarian monarchies. This case deserves further inspection.