Authoritarian records vary enormously, which shows the regime type is not what is doing the work

The argument

A second argument concerns what the evidence can support. Opponents note that the countries usually offered as proof of authoritarian effectiveness are selected after the fact from a far larger set of similar regimes, most of which produced stagnation, debt, famine or war. The same form of government, they argue, has been associated with the fastest recorded improvements in living standards and with the most complete collapses, and a variable that accompanies both outcomes cannot be what distinguishes them. Opponents argue that what varies between the successes and the failures is visible in the cases themselves: whether a competent civil service was inherited or built, whether the state could tax, whether property rights were secure enough for anyone to invest, whether land reform had already happened, what the country could sell and to whom. These are features of institutions and circumstance rather than of the absence of elections, and several of them are harder to establish where rulers are unconstrained, since insecure property and arbitrary expropriation are characteristic authoritarian risks. They add a point about durability. Because such a system has no settled method for transferring power, the gains it produces are held at the discretion of whoever holds office next, and opponents argue that development interrupted by coup, purge or succession crisis is not development delivered. A model whose results depend on the character of an individual ruler and cannot survive that ruler's departure is not, on this account, an effective approach to development but a gamble that occasionally pays.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Proponents reply that the same selection objection applies to democracies, whose record also ranges from sustained prosperity to prolonged stagnation, so the argument shows that regime type alone explains little rather than that authoritarian government is ineffective. They add that if administrative capacity and the ability to tax are what matter, the original case stands, since those are precisely the capabilities a government insulated from organised interests is better placed to build, and that democracies interrupted by deadlock or reversal face a discontinuity of their own.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That the successes are selected after the fact is a fair objection to the opposing argument and is not evidence for this one. It shows the case for authoritarian effectiveness is unproven rather than that the contrary is true. [Rejecting P2] The reasoning that a factor present in both outcomes cannot distinguish them applies with equal force to democracy, whose record also spans sustained prosperity and prolonged stagnation. The premise would establish that regime type explains little either way. [Rejecting P3] Naming administrative capacity, taxation and secure property as the real variables concedes the opposing position's central claim, since those are precisely the capabilities it says an insulated government is better placed to build. The premise identifies what matters without showing which arrangement supplies it.