These are bad times for democracy. Strongmen, from Vladimir Putin in Russia to Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, are flexing their muscles. In America and India democratically elected leaders are flirting with more personalized leadership, if not openly pursuing it.
In Europe voters fed up with sluggish growth and social division are tempted by the promises of charismatic authoritarian populists.
That temptation is dangerous — especially if power is being seized by a single person, rather than in the name of a system, as in China or Vietnam.
To understand why, look to the part of the world where strongman rule is most common: Africa.
For a time in the 1990s the African “big man” seemed a relic of the cold war. Back then, many African countries adopted democratic institutions, introducing term limits and regular elections. Unfortunately, the democratic heyday was short-lived.
In the coming months, several leaders who have been in power for decades will run in dodgy elections.
These include Paul Biya, the 92-year-old president of Cameroon, and Yoweri Museveni, the 81-year-old leader of Uganda. Seven of the 10 longest-serving leaders in the world, barring monarchs, are in Africa.
Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea holds the record, with more than 46 years in power. Typically, they stay 50% longer than leaders elsewhere.
Big men are unequivocally bad for political rights. They harass their opponents, imprison them, drive them into exile or have them killed. Free speech is tightly curtailed. Corruption is rampant.
Yet defenders of big-man rule tend to argue that, despite all these costs to political freedom, such leaders are needed to bind poor, fragile and divided societies together.
Pointing to places like Rwanda, under Paul Kagame, they say that strongmen can provide a degree of stability and economic growth that eludes many messy democracies.
New research suggests that this is wrong.
Even if strongmen start out relatively competent, they tend to become worse over time. Particularly once they breach term limits, governance deteriorates.
Patronage networks become narrower, with more goodies dished out to a shrinking inner circle. Corruption increases. Leaders become more likely to rig elections and then use violence to suppress protests against the inevitable result.
However long autocrats stay in power, countries dominated by a single leader, in Africa or elsewhere, tend to produce poor economic outcomes.
Democracies and “institutionalized autocracies” with single parties operate according to an implicit social contract.
