Does regime type matter for economic institutions in non‐democracies?

Abstract

We provide evidence that the quality of economic institutions in non‐democracies is not uniform, and differences in the type of political regimes lead to such variations. By dividing non‐democracies into four groups of monarchies, personal dictatorships, party dictatorships, and military dictatorships, we argue that monarchies perform better than the others due to their structural characteristics. Using a broad sample of non‐democracies, we empirically find that the performance of economic institutions is better in monarchies compared to other forms of dictatorships. Moreover, no significant difference is observed between the performance of personal, party, and military dictatorships.