Successful Dictatorship: Indicators, Factors, Strategies

The research on success factors of modern dictatorships mainly belongs to the large areas of comparative politics and political economy. The key research question is the identification of factors and strategies aimed at assisting autocratic political regimes in sustaining their survival, promoting their capacity and achieving major positive outcomes in the economic and social development. The strategy of research is based on the neo-institutional paradigm of rational choice. The research methods are the regression analysis, principal component analysis, correlation analysis, cluster analysis. The research is divided into four sections. In the first section the investigation of different views on the existence of autocratic political regimes concentrates on two fundamental paradigms and their development on the four stages of research. The second section contains multivariate statistical calculations of autocratic success indicators. The empirical identification of autocratic strategies is the core subject of the third section. Eventually, the fourth section formulates and checks hypotheses regarding the factors of the successful nondemocratic rule. Important outcomes of the research can be considered as the identification of successful dictatorships (the most successful of modern dictatorships are Saudi Arabia, China, Singapore), their classification on the basis of degree of success, the study of real combinations of strategies of non-democratic rule, the selection of the most successful of them (combining a strategy of legitimation with any other), and finally, conclusions derived from a comprehensive analysis of the factors influencing this success. The empirical basis for operationalization of regimes throughout the study is founded on the datasets by B. Geddes, H. Cheibub, M. Svolik, Polity IV. Also many other datasets on socio-economic and political indicators were used for the operationalization of the strategies and other independent success factors.