The last few years have seen the rise of a number of ‘strongman’ leaders, with the likes of Donald Trump, Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin come to the fore in governments across the world. Alas, new research from RMIT University suggests that such leaders aren’t especially good for the countries they lead.
The research examined the fortunes of countries run by dictators over the past 150 years and found that dicatators rarely oversaw growing economies.
“In an era where voters are willingly trading their political freedoms in exchange for promises of strong economic performance to strongman figures like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin or Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it’s important to understand whether autocratic leaders do deliver economic growth,” the researchers explain. “Our empirical results show no evidence that autocratic leaders are successful at delivering economic growth in any systematic way.”
Autocratic failures
Indeed, so rare was it to find an autocratic leader overseeing a successful economy that their presence is roughly equivalent to that found by chance alone. By contrast, it was far more likely that an autocrat would be found in charge of a poorly performing economy. What’s more, their failings were not confined to economic performance.
“We also examined whether autocratic leaders were good at implementing measures which mainly benefit the less well-off in society, such as reducing unemployment or spending more on health and education. That was not the case,” the researchers explain. “We also looked further into whether growth-positive autocrats, although infrequent, really do deserve the credit for turning around their country’s economic fate.”
The analysis found no real evidence that autocratic leaders had any real positive influence on the economies over which they presided, with any influence more likely to drive their economies down than up.
So why do autocrats emerge and gain a degree of support? The researchers believe our evolutionary tendency to back a single alpha individual is key, with this feeding into a tendency to ascribe all successes to the actions of that one individual, even if in reality they’ve had no control over the outcomes at all.
This desire for a strong leader is especially strong in times of uncertainty, where we believe that the leader can dampen the inherent unpredictability of the time. Given the seeming popularity of strongman leaders around the world in the current time, it’s perhaps a finding that is especially pertinent.
