Economic Liberalism in Illiberal Regimes: Authoritarian Variation and the Political Economy of Trade

Over the last few decades, a vast literature has emerged examining the relationship between democratic political institutions and trade policy outcomes. While this literature has added significantly to our knowledge, it has effectively ignored policymaking in dozens of important states—those that remain autocratic. This paper fills that hole by exploring the effects of authoritarian variation on national trade policies. Our contention is that more institutionalized authoritarian regimes will tend to adopt more open trade policies. This relationship should hold, we argue, for two distinct reasons. First, we argue that autocratic regimes with larger “selectorates” should have greater incentives to provide public rather than private goods. As a result, we expect that multiparty, and to a lesser extent single-party, autocracies will tend to prefer more open trade policies than non-party (often personalistic) dictatorships, monarchies, and military juntas. Second, we contend that more stable autocratic regimes will have longer time horizons and therefore greater incentives to adopt policies, such as trade openness, that may strengthen long-run economic performance. We find strong support for these arguments using several cross-national time-series models of all autocracies ranging from 1962 to 2007 (contingent on data availability)