Single-party regime, cooptation, and strategic social spending in developing countries

Abstract

How regime types affect the provision of social spending in the context of developing countries? This article provides a novel political-economic approach, arguing that single-party regimes are more likely to spend on pensions than other types of autocratic states to co-opt the large number of critical members although the regime type does not affect the general welfare spending across autocratic states. The theory emphasizes the effect of institutional and power structure heterogeneity across autocracies in shaping the incentives and strategies that the ruling elites co-opt and respond to the demands of the ruling coalition across different autocratic regimes. Using panel, ordinary least squares (OLS) regression with lagged dependent variable along with several empirical strategies, it finds the evidence supporting this argument with a new dataset from 1990 to 2012. The study provides new insights on how autocratic institutions especially the party utilize strategic social policies to resolve the elite-level dictator dilemma for regime survival that are absent in other autocratic types.