Rudra and Haggard: Globalization, Democracy and Effective Welfare Spending in the Developing World

Rudra, N, and S Haggard. 2005. Globalization, democracy, and effective welfare spending in the developing world. Comparative Political Studies 38, no. 9: 1015.

"The results show that social spending in 'hard' authoritarian regimes is more sensitive to the pressures of globalization than in democratic or intermediate regimes" (1015; from abstract).

"Our findings cast substantial doubt on the hypothesis that globalization necessarily has an adverse effect on welfare spending in developing countries. We find that political institutions and the rules governing political competition matter. In the face of increasing trade openness, in particular, authoritarian regimes are less generous than democracies with respect to social spending and do worse with respect to several key social performance indicators. Also of significance, we find that under conditions of globalization, 'intermediate' authoritarian regimes show different social spending patterns than 'hard' authoritarian regimes and in some cases, behave more similar to democracies" (1017).

Rudra, N. 2008. Welfare states in developing countries: unique or universal? The Journal of Politics 69, no. 02: 378-396.

Rudra further promotes a distinction between three types of welfare states in LDCs: productive welfare (promote market development), protective welfare (protect select interest groups) and combinations of the above.