Charron, Nicholas, and Victor Lapuente. "Which Dictators Produce Quality of Government?". Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol.46, No.4 (2011): 397-423.

Charron, Nicholas, and Victor Lapuente. "Which Dictators Produce Quality of Government?". Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol.46, No.4 (2011): 397-423.

• There is not a clear relationship between levels of democracy and improve quality of government, as measured by economic growth, health outcomes, and social welfare. The fact that countries with as radically different qualities of government as Singapore and Haiti rank similarly on scales of democracy demonstrates that significant variation must exist within the category of non-democratic regimes (398).
• The authors find that the main predictor of either an authoritarian regime will demonstrate good quality of governance is whether it is a single-party state or not; even in this case, high quality of government is conditional upon that state being wealthy, as poor single-party states have generally low quality of government (399, 419).
• This trend is due to a confluence of supply and demand-side factors in single-party dictatorships. Citizens of wealthier countries will be more likely to demand concessions and good quality of governance, and single-party states are the most responsive dictatorial regimes. In other authoritarian systems, these demands could be ignored, and they are not as present in poorer states, meaning that this category of wealthier single-party regimes is exceptional (419).
• The authors define 'quality of governance' as the condition of the state bureaucracy being relatively functional in its delivery of economic and social services with minimal corruption. The measurement of this variable is a composite of the 'risk' of the country, as generated by the International Country Risk Guide, and the World Bank governance indicators (400).
• The use of the International Country Risk Guide carries significant chances of error, since it depends on 'expert' opinions generated in a fundamentally nontransparent system of comparison (401).
• Based on the typology developed by Dr. Barbara Geddes in a 1999 article, the authors assume four types of authoritarian regimes based on different organization structures: the military regime dependent on the army, monarchies with royal families, single-party states with ruling parties, and personalistic regimes with cronies (402, 404).
• Unlike military and monarchical regimes, single-party states do not have a pre-existing structure for governance like the military hierarchy or traditional loyalties. Single-party states need to consciously develop support, meaning that they are more motivated to supply services and have higher quality of government (405).
• The quality of government produced in military, personalistic, or monarchical autocracies dependents on the goals and outlook of the leadership. These leaders can either be short-sighted and exploitative, producing a very low quality of government, or they can have long-term goals and planning, generating high quality of governance (406).