Authoritarianism And Development

Introduction

Throughout human history and around the globe, economic development has been essential to the people’s livelihood and it has been acting as a scale to assess leaders’ achievements and legitimacy to rule. Countries adopted different models to achieve economic prosperity, and some of them, with highly contrasting characteristics and values, had nevertheless succeeded.

Relationship between authoritarian systems and economic development has been studied extensively, majority of the studies have reached the conclusion that there is no direct causal relationship between the two, which I agree. Some of these studies accounted economic success for state capacity and colonial history. However, I believe that there are other factors that

Some argued that the miraculous economic performances in the above countries are resulted from authoritarian state regimes. The centralized power structure enables authoritarian government to achieve suppression of consumption, technocratic rationality, mass mobilization, insulation from different socio-political pressures that would lead to inconsistent policies, and the building of developmental ideologies which emphasize diligence and sacrificing for the country. All of these are necessary conditions for early stages of economic and industrial development. Referring to authoritarian countries that have achieved “economic miracles”, people argued that Asian countries, due to their unique cultural roots, tend to better adapt one-party rule and preservation of social harmony , hence would develop its economy more effectively under authoritarian

He explained that it is because democratic governments are held accountable for their people during their term of office, if the government wanted to continue its rule, he must listen and respond to people’s opinions and economic needs, otherwise, people would not vote for the government in the next election. Sen from this concluded that democracy is essential for economic development. Moreover, he stressed that economic development requires political freedom and transparency, and he pointed out that there is an instrumental relationship between political freedom and fulfilment of economic needs.

Sen’s claim seems to be supported by statistics. According to United Nation’s Human Development Report, the top 10 most affluent countries are all democracies including Norway, Australia and the United States. However, majority of these countries have long history of economic development, and have already achieved industrialization before democratization. It is doubted whether the statistics constitute a direct positive causal relationship between level of democracy and economic development.

There are always exceptions. Take India as an example. Different from other advance democratic countries, India did not have a taste of economic prosperity during the first 50 years of democracy. Besides, Ethiopia, being a country following the presidential system with high degree of democracy,