The gulf between what we all like to believe and what happens can be wide. We have seen this before in the one-child policy of China. We called it the claim instinct. Because it contained the perfect recipe – a mighty leader, an intervention and results that fitted a narrative.
We look at a similar one today – that of benevolent dictator. The phrase may sound like an oxymoron for anybody who lives in the modern world. The benevolent autocrat is a school of thought on leadership, and its proponents take examples from countries such as Singapore as their test case. As per this school, these well-intended rulers bring higher economic prosperity to their countries.
The paper written by Rizio and Skali examined this claim by collecting data from 133 countries over 150 years starting from 1858. Their mathematical analysis consisted of three variables – rulers (taken from Archigos database), political regime (Polity IV dataset), and GDP per capita (Maddison dataset).
Misguided belief in dictators
The results showed that good dictators brought prosperity no different from what chance would have made. At the same time, bad dictatorships showed a clear negative impact on the economy.
References
S.M. Rizio and A. Skali, The Leadership Quarterly 31 (2020) 101302
Introducing Archigos: A Dataset of Political Leaders
Polity IV Individual Country Regime Trends
Maddison Project Database 2013
