A debate has long been raging in universities and think tanks, through public diplomacy and state media: Does democracy or autocracy perform better in times of crisis?
There is no doubt about the benefit of democracy in matters such as individual rights or the rule of law. Still, discussions about which system is more effective in addressing major national challenges are attracting a lot of attention, especially given China’s earth-shattering rise and growing frustration in the West over political infighting.
Now two simultaneous crises – climate change and the pandemic – are testing governments. Their performance is scrutinized in a number of studies, with this result: While democracies on average perform slightly better in dealing with these problems, neither democracy nor dictatorship has shown a clear and consistent lead.
Comprehensive theories about the supposed benefits of one system or the other have done little to predict how these crises would turn out.
For example, it was once widely believed that dictatorships like China’s, because of their centralized authority and generational schedules for plans, would be uniquely equipped to deal with challenges such as climate change.
But Beijing’s pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions have been thwarted by political infighting and short-term commitments of the kind that China’s propagandists say characterize democracies.
At the same time, while some democracies have excelled at handling climate-related issues, others have struggled, most notably the United States, which saw another climate plan collapse amid a congressional lockdown earlier this month.
And then there’s the pandemic.
Predictions that transparency and sensitivity to public opinion would make democracies better equipped to deal with the virus have turned out badly. So are statements that dictatorships would excel for their ability to act decisively and proactively; many don’t.
Multiple studies have shown that both systems performed about the same on average in managing the pandemic as measured by metrics such as excess deaths.
Democracies have done a little better. But experts emphasize that this narrow gap may not reflect that democracies are better equipped, but rather that countries with, say, stronger health systems are more likely to be more democratic.
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Both systems can function effectively, as the pandemic has shown, with both individual democracies and dictatorships among the best performers in the world at slowing the spread of the virus.
And both systems can falter, as with China’s pandemic restrictions to the point where its own economy collapses, or the United States’ climate plans collapsing under the opposition of a senator representing half a percent of the population.
This undermines theories that both systems have an innate advantage in certain crises, but it points to a different lesson: The prevailing threats to democracy and autocracy may not come from each other, but from weaknesses within.
Assess the systems
“This is an incredibly complicated question, in part because there are so many different ways to assess performance,” Justin Esarey, a political scientist at Wake Forest University, said of the “huge” body of studies in which the political system rules better.
That question gained more attention in the 1990s when several Asian autocracies, with thriving economies, presented what was seen as a new rival to the democratic model. Since then, economic performance has been seen as the measure of how the system works better.
Two schools of thought emerged. One said that dictatorships like China, freed from the short-termism imposed by elections or the petty inefficiencies of the democratic process, could implement better policies.
The other said the transparency and accountability of democracies make for better governed and responsive governance. Proponents pointed to South Korea’s booming economy under democracy just as North Korea collapsed.
Both theories have been doing the rounds ever since. But neither monitors consistently.
A study of authoritarian economies worldwide, for example, found that, on average, they did not outperform or lag behind democracies. Those that grew did so for the same reason some democracies did: smart choices by leaders, better-run institutions, and other factors.
The two systems work differently, but the differences often cancel each other out.
Another study found that democracies are slightly better at curbing recessions, and party-based dictatorships slightly better at stimulating growth, but in the end the economic performance of the systems proved comparable.
This hardly applies to every benchmark. Citizens’ happiness, health measures such as infant mortality and the quality of public services are all better under democracy – not to mention the freedoms whose protection is part of the point of democracy after all.
And questions of pure performance have remained relevant as global crises such as the climate and the pandemic have become increasingly important.
The pandemic seems to provide the perfect opportunity to test which system can govern more effectively, as it has affected every country on Earth and its toll is measurable.
But research by Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace came to much the same conclusion as those economic studies. Democracies and dictatorships will do about equally well or badly, with neither consistently outperforming the other.
While some commentators pointed to, for example, Iran’s early failures as evidence that the secrecy and corruption of dictatorships would condemn them, others pointed to how many autocracies, such as Vietnam, excelled.
And for every democracy that struggled, like the United States, another, like New Zealand or Taiwan, performed well, undermining theories that democracy, in general, was too messy or slow to respond.
What mattered, Dr. Kleinfeld, were factors such as social trust or institutional competence. And neither system is necessarily and consistently better at cultivating it.
Another study, recognizing that dictators are more likely to lie about the toll of the pandemic, examined a difficult-to-falsify metric called excess mortality. They found that democracies, on average, were better at reducing pandemic deaths than dictatorships — but again, the gap was small and may have been explained by factors other than the political system.
Could climate, a protracted and arguably larger crisis, shed a different light?
To many in the United States, authoritarianism may seem in favor as Beijing’s leaders have announced one dramatic climate policy after another.
But some democracies have proved equally aggressive on climate, suggesting that the US struggle is less due to democracy itself than to idiosyncrasies specific to the US system.
And dictatorships can be as messy as any democracy. Take China’s acclaimed Five-Year Plans, which claim to define long-term policies without the fuss of legislative horse-trading or infighting.
In reality, the documents may read less like legislation than a wish list, and sometimes a vague list, sent by central planners to provincial and agency leaders who decide for themselves how to pursue those decrees, if at all.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, may announce greenhouse gas reductions until he’s blue in the face, but he may not be able to count on his own government to stick to it — which it apparently hasn’t. China’s provincial leaders and its state-owned enterprises have built more new coal-fired power stations than the rest of the world’s countries combined.
Some of this may be policy confusion. Beijing has demanded economic growth as well as carbon reduction, forcing local officials to figure out what to highlight. But some can also be challenging.
Beijing has long struggled to force local officials to serve the national good. For many years, Mr. Xi announced China’s intentions to cut its steel production, but output would rise the following year as production increased in individual provinces, causing market skipping and harming the industry nationally.
In one infamous example, Beijing ordered provincial leaders to curb water pollution that then endangered the country’s health. Instead of reducing polluting factories, officials moved them to their borders so that pollution, which increased across the country, flowed to the next province.
Early in the pandemic, local leaders withheld information about the outbreak from central planners. And with officials under pressure to keep the number of infections close to zero, they are crushing local economies with devastating national consequences.
These ups and downs are certainly related to China’s autocratic model. But countries with similar systems have often struggled where China succeeded, or succeeded where it struggled.
Likewise, American successes and setbacks have barely kept pace with the achievements of other democracies, for better or for worse.
“It’s normal for the people who live under one system to envy the benefits of the other,” said Dr. Esarey, especially when both democracies and dictatorships worldwide face increasing internal challenges.
The data, he added, instead supports a conclusion sometimes attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to Winston Churchill, the former British leader: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.”