The Impact of Autocratic Regimes on Quality of Government

While institutional quality has become a mantra for development professionals, its political determinants remain open to debate. So far, most studies on the nexus between regime type and quality of government have treated autocracies as a coherent group of countries. However, it is evident that regime characteristics vary a great deal not only between democracies and autocracies, but also among autocratic countries. Some autocracies have been able to build effective institutions, whereas others lag well behind the world average. This study provides an institutionalist perspective to differences in quality of government in autocracies and argues that certain autocratic regime types create more quality of government than others. Specifically, the empirical findings of our time-series cross-sectional analysis, based on a sample of 90 autocratic countries over a period of time from 1995 to 2014, suggest that monarchic autocracies generate more and military autocracies generate less quality of government than multiparty autocracies.