Revisiting the Personalism and Economic Performance Debate: Do All Personalist Dictators Produce Worse Economic Outcomes?

I revisit the debate around personalism and economic performance in dictatorships and the stylized fact that personalist regimes produce poor economic outcomes. Conceiving of and measuring personalism as a time-varying trait of autocratic rule as opposed to a regime typology, I find that many regimes with high personalism scores perform quite well in terms of both gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and growth. Only regimes at the highest levels of personalism have significantly worse performance. These results are based on quantitative analysis of cross-national data from 101 countries between 1960 and 2010 to probe the hypothesis. These early findings are relevant to the growing literature on personalism in dictatorship and raise new questions regarding the conditions under which personalism leads to poor economic outcomes.