The Myth of the Authoritarian Model

How Putin's Crackdown Holds Russia Back

Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2008

Summary:  A growing conventional wisdom holds that Vladimir Putin's attack on democracy has brought Russia stability and prosperity -- providing a new model of successful market authoritarianism. But the correlation between autocracy and economic growth is spurious. Autocracy's effects in Russia have in fact been negative. Whatever the gains under Putin, they would have been greater under a democratic regime.

MICHAEL MCFAUL is a Hoover Fellow, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. KATHRYN STONER-WEISS is Associate Director for Research and Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University

One can only wonder how fast Russia would have grown with a more democratic system. The strengthening of institutions of accountability -- a real opposition party, genuinely independent media, a court system not beholden to Kremlin control -- would have helped tame corruption and secure property rights and would thereby have encouraged more investment and growth. The Russian economy is doing well today, but it is doing well in spite of, not because of, autocracy.

THE ANGOLA MODEL

Kremlin officials and their public-relations operatives frequently evoke China as a model: a seemingly modernizing autocracy that has delivered an annual growth rate over ten percent for three decades. China is also an undisputed global power, another attribute that Russian leaders admire and want to emulate. If China is supposed to be Exhibit A in the case for a new model of successful authoritarianism, the Kremlin wants to make Russia Exhibit B.

Identifying China as a model -- instead of the United States, Germany, or even Portugal -- already sets the development bar much lower than it was just a decade ago. China remains an agrarian-based economy with per capita GDP below $2,000 (about a third of Russia's and a 15th of Germany's). But the China analogy is also problematic because sustained high growth under autocracy is the exception, not the rule, around the world. For every China, there is an autocratic developmental disaster such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo; for every authoritarian success such as Singapore, there is a resounding failure such as Myanmar; for every South Korea, a North Korea. In the economic-growth race in the developing world, autocracies are both the hares and the snails, whereas democracies are the tortoises -- slower but steadier. On average, autocracies and democracies in the developing world have grown at the same rate for the last several decades.

As Putin and his team devise schemes to avoid a real handover of power later this year, their contortions to maintain themselves at the head of the Russian state seem much more successful than their efforts at improving governance or growing the economy at a faster pace. World energy and raw-material prices make sustained economic growth in Russia likely for the foreseeable future. But sustained autocratic rule will not contribute to this growth and, because of continued poor governance, is likely to serve as a drag on economic development in the long term. Russians are indeed getting richer, but they could be getting even richer much faster.

The Kremlin talks about creating the next China, but Russia's path is more likely to be something like that of Angola -- an oil-dependent state that is growing now because of high oil prices but has floundered in the past when oil prices were low and whose leaders seem more intent on maintaining themselves in office to control oil revenues and other rents than on providing public goods and services to a beleaguered population. Unfortunately, as Angola's president, José Eduardo dos Santos, has demonstrated by his three decades in power, even poorly performing autocracies can last a long, long time.