Recent work at the frontiers of classical liberal political economy has reconsidered the idea that certain autocratic political institutions may improve on the consensus liberal, constitutional democratic political institutions. This paper will discuss conceptually how these new arguments, predatory forms of autocracy, the status quo of constitutional democracy, and the proponents of more majoritarian forms of democratic governance should be understood in terms of one another. It will then perform a simple empirical examination of the modern world, looking at the quality of governance by country by the quality of its democracy, conditional on a country’s economic output, education, and culture. Examples of autocracy with good governance, even when conditioning on these other variables, are sufficiently rare to raise serious questions for the new classical liberal proponents of autocracy.

中文翻译：

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治理和专制的维度

最近在古典自由政治经济学前沿的工作重新考虑了某些专制政治制度可能会改进共识的自由、宪政民主政治制度的观点。本文将从概念上讨论如何理解这些新论点、掠夺性的专制形式、宪政民主的现状以及更多多数民主治理形式的支持者。然后，它将对现代世界进行简单的实证检验，以国家的经济产出、教育和文化为条件，通过民主质量来考察国家治理质量。具有良好治理的独裁统治的例子，即使以这些其他变量为条件，