Development needs decades of consistency, and elections do not supply it

The argument

Proponents of this position begin from the time horizon development requires. Ports, power systems, railways, irrigation, universities and industrial policy pay back over decades, and they fail if the commitment behind them is withdrawn partway. An elected government, proponents argue, is organised around a far shorter horizon: it must show results before the next contest, it may be replaced by a successor with different priorities, and it has a standing incentive to spend on what is visible now rather than on what matters later. A government that does not face removal, on this reasoning, can hold a plan in place long enough for it to work. Proponents argue the same about the costs. Most of what development requires is unpopular at the point of imposition: land must be acquired, subsidies withdrawn, protected industries exposed to competition, consumption suppressed in favour of saving and investment. Each of these creates identifiable losers who will organise against it, and in an electoral system their resistance is usually decisive, so reforms are diluted into ineffectiveness or reversed by the next administration. An authoritarian government can carry the cost through to the point where the benefit appears. The third element is speed. Where decisions require assembling a coalition, consulting affected interests and surviving legal challenge, proponents argue, the process consumes years that a poor country cannot spare, and the same decision taken quickly leaves more time for the investment to compound.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents reply that the argument compares an idealised dictatorship with a dysfunctional democracy, when unaccountable governments are also the least constrained in abandoning plans, redirecting investment to allies and seizing assets, and face no mechanism at all for replacing a leader whose strategy fails. They add that authoritarian succession is itself a source of radical discontinuity, since the death or overthrow of a ruler can reverse a programme more completely than any election, and that the record of such regimes includes the most costly development failures as well as its successes.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That long-horizon investment fails when commitment is withdrawn is granted, and it does not establish that authoritarian government supplies the commitment. Such governments redirect investment to allies and abandon programmes with no mechanism available to prevent either. [Rejecting P2] The electoral horizon is described at its worst and set against authoritarian planning at its best. Democracies have sustained infrastructure and institutional programmes across many changes of government, which the premise does not accommodate. [Rejecting P3] That organised losers are usually decisive under elections is asserted, and concentrated interests are in fact harder to resist where there is no press, no opposition and no court to appeal to, because the bargain is then struck privately with the ruler.