Abstract
Why and how do authoritarian regimes pursue development strategies that eventually undermine their survival, while democracies under similar conditions exhibit different developmental patterns? I develop a dynamic model where education simultaneously fosters human capital and civic culture, which shapes political behavior asymmetrically across regimes. Under autocracy, growing civic culture increases regime change risk, creating a modernization threat that compels rulers to strategically curb investment as development proceeds, resulting in a hump-shaped development path of rapid growth followed by strategic stagnation. Under democracy, civic culture strengthens electoral accountability, but outcomes are history-dependent: weak initial civic foundations trap societies in low-investment equilibria, while sufficiently strong civic culture triggers virtuous cycles of sustained development. This asymmetry — where civic culture threatens autocratic survival but enables democratic accountability — explains divergent modernization paths. The model reconciles why some autocracies achieve impressive early growth yet face self-limiting development, while democracies exhibit varying performance depending on civic foundations, offering new insights into the political economy of long-run development.
The talk will be streamed via Zoom. Link to the meeting is here.