The Autocratic Welfare State: Old-Age Pensions, Credible Commitments, and Regime Survival

Abstract

In this paper we argue that autocratic regimes are no less likely than democracies to adopt old-age pensions, although autocratic programs are less universal in their coverage. Our theoretical argument focuses on the strong incentives that autocratic regimes have for enacting and maintaining such programs to ensure regime survival. Autocratic pension programs can be considered club goods that I) are targeted to critical supporting groups and II) solve credible commitment problems on promises of future distribution, thereby mitigating probability of regime breakdown. We test three implications from the argument, drawing on a novel dataset on welfare state programs and including 140 countries with time series from the 1880s. First, we find that autocracies are no less likely than democracies to have old-age pension programs. But, second, autocracies have less universal pension programs than democracies. Third, pension programs effectively reduce the probability of autocratic breakdown. * We are grateful to Øyvind Skorge,

Left is right and right is left? Partisan difference on social welfare and particularistic benefits in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan

“…Usually the small circle of supporters includes organized groups with identifiable features, eg. ruling party members, soldiers, landowners, civil servants, teachers, industrial workers or business groups (Knutsen & Rasmussen, 2018). Because retracting the support from these groups can increase the chance of regime collapse or leadership change, a wide range of private goods tend to be provided to them.…”

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“…Later experiences have provided support for the same conclusion (Besley and Kudamatsu, 2006;Haggard and Kaufman, 2008;Kudamatsu, 2012;Lindert, 2004). However, a deviant idea has recently been presented -and substantiated -by Knutsen and Rasmussen (2018). Looking particularly at old-age pensions, they found that such schemes are as likely to be introduced in nondemocracies; the rationale being that such endeavours increase the probability of regime survival.…”

“…Its correlation with our measure was 0.64. In addition, Knutsen and Rasmussen's (2018) data include an index of the overall degree of universalism in the six programmes considered, for approximately half of the observations in our longitudinal dataset. The correlation between this index and our indicator of SP was 0.87.…”

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