Efficiency of Democracy from a Study of Dictatorship

In recent years there has been a great deal of new work on the efficiency of democracy. The most important contributions have probably been the literature on probabilistic voting,1 ‘the rational partisan model ’ origi-nated by Wittman (1983) and developed further by Alesina (1988) and others, and the ‘new institutional economics’, especially that ap-plied to bureaucratic theory (Breton and Wintrobe, 1975 and 1982; Weingast and Moran, 1983) which has tended to displace the old literature on the inefficiency of bureaucracy. However, all these models, like the older median voter model or the Stigler–Peltzman–Olson–Becker in-terest group approach, have been developed without reference to non-democratic regimes. It is odd that economists have spilled so much ink modelling monopoly in the private sector, where it is a relatively trivial problem, while hardly any effort has been exerted2 modelling monopoly in politics, where it is probably the most important problem in the social sciences