At a CDDRL research seminar held on October 15, 2026, Christopher Dann, a pre-doctoral fellow at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and a PhD candidate in Political Science at Stanford, presented his research on legitimacy and large-scale infrastructure in 21st-century autocracies.

His research centered on a puzzle: how have autocracies modernized so successfully in the 21st century while sustaining authoritarian rule? Dann argued that a sizable number of today’s autocracies cultivate reputations for delivery to build mass support for the regime. They do so by organizing development around large-scale infrastructure, which is unusually visible, durable, and difficult to reverse. These qualities make infrastructure a costly and lasting signal of a dictator’s developmental intent, and they give citizens credible reason to believe the regime is committed to the majority’s future welfare.

Dann began by noting that modernization theory expected economic development to bring democracy. Instead, the world has seen a democratic recession, and many regimes, including Vietnam, Rwanda, Serbia, and Türkiye, have modernized while remaining authoritarian. He explained that 20th-century dictatorships were relatively poor and fear-based, relying on repression, coercion, and ideology, and that they bought support cheaply through patronage and targeted transfers. Today, however, autocrats have moved from fear to competence. They favor a rhetoric of economic performance and public services, and the countries with the highest confidence in national government are fast-growing autocracies.

To test this, Dann used data, following a recently released World Bank report, on approximately 150,000 large-scale construction projects worldwide from 2005 to 2024, each costing at least $25 million. The data show that autocracies build more than democracies, spend roughly twice as much per year, and complete and cancel more projects. They also build more new infrastructure rather than maintain old stocks, and they concentrate on transport and energy while democracies put relatively more into education and healthcare. In addition, autocracies build at about a third of the cost per kilometer for transport projects. As Dann explained, these differences arguably stem from longer political time horizons, fewer institutional constraints such as veto points and regulatory hurdles, thus providing a comparative advantage for wealthy, stable autocracies.

To measure the political return, Dann combined nine existing survey datasets covering about 2.5 million respondents in more than 2,300 districts. He then compared districts within the same country that received infrastructure at different times. Using this approach, he found that in autocracies and backsliding regimes, about 40 additional completed projects in a district raised confidence in government by roughly one percentage point, about a quarter of the gap in confidence between Singapore and the neighboring Malaysian state of Johor. Democracies showed no significant effect. Infrastructure also raised leadership approval and lowered perceptions of corruption, and newly built transport projects with government funding drove most of the effect.

Ultimately, Dann’s research offers a new account of authoritarian resilience, one that explains how autocracies govern more educated, urban, and wealthier societies through broad-based, performative distribution. He closed by questioning whether the more well-to-do a nation is in the 21st century, the greater its chances of sustaining autocracy.