regimes.<sup>7</sup> Yet, part of our task is to make this distinction, which is arguably very important in practice.

A main difference between democratic and autocratic governments in my context is that vote getting is central for politicians in democracies, but much less so in autocracies. A key issue is then, in democracies, to consider how policies are shaped so as to maximally capture voters. Under extreme autocracy or authoritarianism, by contrast, vote getting is of no concern, while staying in power more generally is. It may still be difficult to draw a sharp empirical distinction between these two mechanisms, since authoritarian governments will also need to mobilize support from key groups. But a clear difference is that an autocratic government will a) be concerned mainly with staying in power outside of an electoral political process, thus not needing broad popular support crucial for a democratic government; and b) have little concern for the welfare of broad population groups and generally less so than a democratic government; in particular, key support groups are often far smaller than in democracies. One consequence may be to expect autocratic governments to supply less public goods than democratic governments.<sup>8</sup> This of course also depends on the amount of resources available to the regimes: some very resource-rich autocracies (such as some of those in the Middle East) do spend heavily on a wide range of public goods, benefitting wide population groups, in order to avoid conflict.

Another possible difference between democratic and authoritarian regimes could lie in the degree to which the preferences of politicians and the public overlap. For authoritarian regimes, rulers’ preferences may differ widely from those of many population groups, especially the poor, and this difference is often more pronounced than for democratic regimes. This is an issue separate from the vote-getting motivation of democratic policies, although it may sometimes be difficult to disentangle them empirically. One case where it may seem possible to disentangle such motivations is for politicians who are not up for reelection, so that vote getting is no (or less) concern for them. The hypothesis is then that politicians who were elected democratically, more than non-elected politicians implement policies in line with wide public preferences, in particular due to their higher overall education.<sup>9</sup> This is likely to translate into both greater average ability, and higher average leadership quality, in democratic versus autocratic regimes. There is also

> 7 Persson and Tabellini (2000) survey the related analytical literature for democratic regimes, but have little to say about authoritarian regimes. Persson, Roland and Tabellini (1999, 2000) discuss differences between types of democratic  governments, namely presidential-congressional versus parliamentarian, with the prediction that fuel taxes will be lower in the former. Such differences are not embedded in my analytical model below. 8 See e.g. Deacon (2009), McGuire and Olson (1996), Lake and Baum (2001). Lott (1999) however finds that totalitarian regimes spend relatively much on education, he argues mainly for indoctrination purposes; but relatively less on health services.

9 See Besley and Reynol-Querol (2011) for an empirical study of how leaders are selected in democracies and autocracies. They find that democratically elected leaders are far more likely to be highly educated. This they take to indicate that ability and quality of democratic leaders is consistently higher than for autocratic leaders. This is also consistent with Papaioannou and Siourounis’s (2008) and Persson and Tabellini’s (2009) findings that democracies have higher economic growth rates than autocracies.

4