RevDem Podcast · Review of Democracy

Delivering Democracies: Maya Tudor on “What Democracy Does…And Does Not Do?”

·31 min·2 clips

Tudor says the “Lee hypothesis” is wrong on average, even though party-based autocracies can grow fast.

1. RevDem Podcast’s “Delivering Democracies” episode centers on Maya Tudor’s Journal of Democracy article, “What Democracy Does and Does Not Do?” 2. Host Anubha Anushree interviews Maya Tudor, a professor at the Blavatnik School of Government and fellow at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. 3. The conversation asks what democracy is for if it does not guarantee growth, equality, or efficiency. 4. Tudor says no regime type guarantees fantastic education, job creation, or clean government. 5. She defines democracy as a political system that organizes power, protects dissent, and secures free press and assembly. 6. Tudor says democratic elections matter because legal protections and horizontal constraints make them meaningful. 7. She compares democracy to a doctor’s Hippocratic Oath, calling it a guarantee against making society’s condition worse. 8. Tudor says her article was motivated by students at Oxford who associated democracy with gridlock, poor delivery, and polarization. 9. She recounts a Tanzanian student who praised the Chinese Communist Party as a model for delivering what citizens want. 10. Tudor says the article reviews global studies on infant mortality, years of schooling, GDP per capita, and political violence. 11. On average, she says democracy delivers longer lives, more schooling, higher growth, and less civil violence. 12. She adds that a single-point increase in democratic history reduces deaths from non-communicable diseases by 2%. 13. Tudor says movement from the least to the most democratic category increases schooling by 1.3 years. 14. She says democratization raises GDP per capita by 10 to 20% over 10 years or more. 15. Tudor says introducing elections is associated with a 13% short-term drop in political violence and a 37% long-term drop over 10 years. 16. She explains that the Lee hypothesis, linked to Lee Kuan Yew, claims authoritarian regimes are better for growth, but the average evidence does not support it. 17. Tudor says better-performing governments tend to have party systems with grassroots support, checks and balances, free press, and civil society. 18. She says democratic decline often shows up as weakened media independence, sidelined parliaments, and ignored judicial review rather than sudden collapse. 19. This interview-style episode is measured, technical, and grounded in cross-national evidence from Oxford, sub-Saharan Africa, China, Singapore, and Taiwan. 20. People interested in democracy, development, and comparative politics will get the most from it, while listeners wanting ideology-free policy debate may skip it.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from RevDem Podcast