Tinpots, Totalitarians (and Democrats): An Empirical Investigation of the Effects of Economic Growth on Civil Liberties and Political Rights

Ronald Wintrobe (1990, 1998) has recently provided a theoretical foundation for estimating equations that attempt to explain the dependence of civil liberties and political rights in non-democratic regimes on the history of economic growth. This theory suggests that data from different kinds of non-democratic countries should not be pooled without allowing coefficients to vary with regime type. It also places interesting restrictions on the signs of the coefficients of economic growth in equations explaining freedom in the types of regimes Wintrobe identifies. In this paper, we employ these restrictions to test Wintrobe's theory. Some additional hypotheses about the difference between democratic and non-democratic regimes and about the role of education, not considered by Wintrobe, are also investigated. The results indicate clearly that the relationship between the degree of freedom -- as measured by the sum of the Gastil indexes of civil liberties and political rights -- and economic growth varies significantly across all types of regimes. Totalitarians (that attempt to maximize power) are clearly different than tinpots (that just attempt to maintain power) in this respect, and non-democratic regimes differ from democracies. Other aspects of the theory are partially confirmed. In particular, in totalitarian regimes, positive growth reduces freedom, and negative growth increases it in some specifications. The theory predicts the opposite pattern for tinpots, and we do find that negative growth reduces freedom in tinpot regimes. However, positive growth in tinpots also appears to reduce freedom in some cases, which is not in accord with the theory.