Autocratic accountability : transparency, the middle class, and political survival in non-democracies

Abstract

Are autocratic leaders accountable to any constituencies? Does fiscal transparency play a role in relation to accountability? Simply put, do authoritarian executives have to “show the bill” of taxes raised and expenditure allocated to their political coalition of support in order to stay in power? What are the dimensions of transparency that matter? The main hypothesis is that the impact of transparency on autocratic accountability depends on the costs and benefits of the fiscal contract perceived by a pivotal constituency – the middle class. In one-party and personalistic regimes where this group is not incorporated into the network of privileges, being transparent about its high costs but low redeemable benefits endangers regime survival. By contrast, autocratic regimes with limited multiparty competition that include the middle class into their coalitions of support are more likely to be transparent about the fiscal costs and benefits of investment in regime longevity. This openness translates into accountability, since autocratic leaders who do not enact it have, on average, a shorter political tenure. I use cross-national measures of fiscal transparency and test the theoretical implications with several survival models of political tenure in autocracies across time and space.