To begin, I examine the economic factors which undoubtedly have a huge influence on the survival of non-democratic regimes.
In many non-democratic countries today, an abundance of wealth held by the ruling elites compared with poverty among the masses helps dictatorships resist democratisation. Often, the ruling elites spend large portions of the funds available to them on suppressing resistance, for example, “China reportedly employs two million censors to police the internet (Bennett and Naim 2015)”[4], while in Peru under Fujimori, “the regime paid more than $36 million a year to the main television channels to skew their coverage, and reportedly offered one channel a $19 million bribe (McMillan and Zoido 2004, pp.82-5)”[4]. This has an opportunity cost; spending on investment and development of industries is foregone, often leaving the citizens of a non-democratic regime stuck in the early stages of Walter Rostow’s 5 Stages of Growth Theory, as shown in Figure 2, which can leave countries primary- or secondary-sector dependent and under-developed. As John Harriss describes, such “economic development [is] conducive to democratisation, partly because [it] strengthens the ‘moderate’ middle class”[5]: a social group of people who are better educated and financially-placed to resist being ‘bought-off’ by a dictator. Emerging middle classes therefore diminish the extent to which non-democratic leaders can bribe their winning coalition with private goods, as the prospect of doing so becomes increasingly expensive as the size and wealth of the middle classes grow as a result of development, while the loyalty norm weakens too.
We may also see a rise in post-materialist values as the population becomes wealthier, since “after a period of sharply rising economic and physical security, one would expect to find substantial differences [in] value priorities, […] for example, post-materialists […] are markedly more tolerant of homosexuality”[6]. This could erode the extent to which the population would be morally willing to accept such bribes, regardless of magnitude. Subsequently, economic development might lead to the demise of such a regime.