Populism is on the rise around the world but the forms it takes can vary widely. Populists can align with the traditional left or right and can be liberal or conservative in their social values. What holds this diverse ideological family together is a sense that the will of the “true people” is being stymied by a corrupt elite — and that strong leadership is necessary to break that system. As tracked by a recent Ipsos poll, populist thought includes beliefs that “the system is broken,” “the economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful,” “traditional parties and politicians don’t care about people like me,” and “to fix our country, we need a strong leader willing to break the rules.”

This commentary focuses on the last of these beliefs, the need for a strong leader willing to break the rules. Ipsos found that 49 percent of respondents in 28 countries agreed with this sentiment. In the United States, the breakdown was 40 percent “agree” vs. 27 percent “disagree.” (See page 27 of the report.)

The Republican ticket in the U.S. presidential campaign of 2024 has made no secret of its willingness to break the rules. Donald Trump has blustered about “the termination” of certain rules, “even those found in the Constitution.” Vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, meanwhile, has declared that as president, Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people” . . . “and when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say—” (invoking an apocryphal quote from Andrew Jackson) “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

Of course, such statements are easy to shrug off as mere electioneering. But we should not dismiss them as purely cynical. In fact, there are hints that a sizeable segment of the American elite has come to believe that the country requires a leader empowered to weaken or outright violate deep-seated rules. The “tech right” that has coalesced around figures such as Vance, after all, draws inspiration from such thinkers as Curtis Yarvin, who advocates “absolute executive supremacy.”

Even the Supreme Court has come to worry that rules may constrain power too tightly. In its July ruling in Trump v. United States, far from warning against rule-breaking, the court found the president to be broadly immune from criminal prosecution for official acts. The decision declared that the nature of presidential power requires limits on accountability — the president should be free to take “bold and unhesitating action,” and exposure to criminal liability might make him “unduly cautious in the discharge of his official duties.”

The trouble is that populist voters and their elite supporters may be relying on a misleading notion of strength. We often hear some head of state described as a “strong leader” when the only indication of strength is the ability to hold onto power year after year. But the ability to stay in power and break rules is not the same as the ability to meet the aspirations of the broad populace. In fact, my research shows just the opposite. Governments are strong where leaders follow the rules. Where leaders break the rules, governments are too weak to fix much of anything. That holds across both democratic and authoritarian regimes. Let’s look at the evidence.

The ability to “fix things” as state capacity

The first step is to find a way to measure the ability of a government to “fix what is broken.” To me, that sounds a lot like what political theorists call state capacity. Broadly, that term refers to the ability of a government to accomplish its aims. Most writers treat state capacity as an ethically neutral concept, avoiding judgments as to whether a given regime’s aims are normatively good or evil. The specific measure that I use averages state capacity across three elements: administrative capacity (how well the bureaucracy works), security capacity (maintaining peace and fighting crime), and fiscal capacity (collecting taxes, managing the budget, and paying debts.)

Next, to determine whether a country’s leaders break the rules or follow them, I develop a measure of rule compliance. For this, I use an equally weighted index of compliance with four kinds of rules: Rule of law pertains to the honesty and efficiency of the judicial system. Government integrity means adherence to rules that restrain corruption. Executive constraints are rules that govern the transition of executive power, and those that impose legislative and executive checks on the power of incumbent chief executives. Finally, quality of market institutions is a matter of compliance with rules regarding property rights, investor protections, contracts, and other regulations of private businesses. This set of rules aims to capture features of governance that are relevant to the whole spectrum of regimes from democratic to autocratic and from liberal to oppressive. My concept of rule compliance thus covers only a subset of all laws and directives. It does not include “rules” that apply only to specific regime types, for example, requirements for accurate counting of votes in a democracy or standards for dress or facial hair in a theocracy.

The third important variable in my analysis is a measure of procedural democracy that focuses on a country’s commitment to holding fair elections with free and open participation. Readers who are familiar with some of my earlier research should take note that procedural democracy is a narrower concept than liberal democracy, which encompasses procedural democracy plus personal freedoms, free markets, and constitutional limits on government. “Democracy” and “democratic” as used in this commentary refer strictly to the procedural sense of the terms. I use the terms “authoritarian” and “autocratic” interchangeably as opposites of procedurally democratic.

The underlying data that I use to construct these three key variables come from the 2023 Legatum Prosperity Index. Keep in mind that there are lags in reporting. None of the individual indicators portray the situation earlier than 2022, and many reflect the situation two or more years in the past. I have converted the Legatum indicators to “Z-scores,” where a value of zero represents the mean for the 166 countries in the data set. The units are the number of standard deviations that a given observation falls from the global mean for that variable. For brevity, I often use the terms “democracy” and “autocracy” to mean countries with Z-scores for procedural democracy greater or less than zero, “strong” or “weak” for those with state capacity scores greater or less than zero, and “compliant” or “noncompliant” for those with rule-compliance scores above or below zero. Interested readers can find the full data with sources and definitions in an online supplement.

State capacity across the political spectrum

Figure 1, which shows how state capacity varies across the autocracy-democracy spectrum, sets the stage. Overall, democracies tend to have higher capacity than nondemocracies, but the fit is not strikingly close. As measured by statistic R2, procedural democracy accounts for only 41 percent of the variation in state capacity across the entire sample. Using an alternative set of procedural democracy scores compiled by Freedom House gives an even lower R2 of 30 percent.

The relationship between democracy and state capacity is not uniform across the spectrum, however. It is strong (R2 = 0.77) among the 88 democracies to the right of the central axis, but for the 78 autocratic regimes on the left, there is no statistically significant relationship. There are more autocracies with weak state capacity (59) than with strong state capacity (19), but it is not possible, statistically speaking, to attribute differences in state capacity within this group to whether a regime is egregiously undemocratic or only slightly below the mean on the democracy scale.

Given the modest influence of procedural democracy, then, it is worth asking what other factors account for differences in state capacity, especially on the authoritarian side of the distribution. Rule compliance turns out to play a major role.

The importance of playing by the rules

Figure 2 adds rule compliance to the data shown in Figure 1. Compliance scores are proportional to the area of the bubble representing each country. Shaded bubbles show positive scores, and empty bubbles show negative scores.  

It is not hard to see that rule compliance is positively associated with state capacity. Out of 71 countries with state capacity higher than the global mean, only 13 have negative scores for rule-compliance. Out of 69 countries with positive rule-compliance scores, only 11 have negative scores for state capacity. As measured by R2, 83 percent of the variation in state capacity among countries is explained by rule compliance.

Unlike the effect of democracy on state capacity, the effect of rule-compliance holds across the spectrum.

To the right of the central axis, Figure 2 is dominated by a group of 48 strong, rule-compliant democracies, shown in solid blue. Just four democracies, all small, have above-average state capacity combined with below-average rule compliance. Among the 36 weaker democracies, shown in green, just 10 have positive scores for rule compliance. For all democracies together, the R2 for state capacity and rule compliance is 0.84.

The surprise, perhaps, is how important rule compliance turns out to be for state capacity among autocracies. Ten authoritarian countries shown in red, led by Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, have positive scores for both rule compliance and state capacity. I call this group “institutional autocracies,” since solid institutional foundations are needed to maintain rule-compliance. (Despite their high ratings on some key aspects of good government, however, the institutional autocracies might not fit everyone’s idea of good places to live. All 10 of them have negative scores on a separate index of human rights and individual freedoms, not shown in the chart.)

For the authoritarian countries together, the R2 for state capacity and rule compliance is 0.72, not far below what it is for democracies. Leaving out the 10 institutional autocracies reduces the R2 to 0.53, lower but still statistically significant. So, even among the weak autocratic regimes, the difference between mediocre compliance and flat-out flouting of the rules accounts for more than half of the difference between slightly subpar state capacity and outright state failure.

Which matters more, democracy or rule compliance?

If both democracy and rule compliance are conducive to strong state capacity, which matters more? Multiple regression analysis provides some insights.

Across all countries, a regression of state capacity on procedural democracy and rule compliance finds that the two independent variables together account for 84 percent of the variation in state capacity. Essentially all that effect comes from rule compliance, with no statistically significant impact from democracy. However, as before, the pattern is very different among democracies and autocracies.

 Among democracies, the combined influence of the independent variables is slightly stronger (R2 = .86). In this group, however, democracy and rule compliance scores each make a significant positive contribution to state capacity. The effect of rule compliance is stronger, but not by much. Among authoritarian regimes, the combined effect of the independent variables is still significant, although not quite so strong (R2 = 0.72). The effect of rule compliance on state capacity accounts for all of that. The finding that among autocracies, democracy scores have no significant impact on state capacity thus carries over from the simple correlation tests to the multiple regression.

A brief note on China

For the most part, this commentary has looked at broad patterns rather than individual countries. It seems worthwhile, however, to make a few comments on the special case of China. China’s size alone justifies the attention. Beyond that, it stands out clearly in Figure 2 as having, by a good margin, the highest state capacity of any country with a negative score for rule compliance.

It is tempting to consider China as proof that a government whose leaders thumb their noses at conventional rules of good government can nonetheless build a powerful and effective state. But a closer look suggests a more complex story.

China’s great transformation began with a set of reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping after the death of Mao in 1976. In several ways, those reforms steered China toward a more rule-based style of government. Rejecting the legal nihilism of the Maoist era, Deng showed a more positive attitude toward the rule of law. He introduced term limits for high officials. And although there was no big-bang transition to a market economy, small village enterprises and special economic zones pioneered at least partial steps toward property rights, enforceable contracts, and investor protections.

The Legatum data used in this study begin only to 2007, but a different index of state capacity, developed by Jonathan Hanson and Rachel Sigman, covers 1960 to 2015. That series, charted in Figure 3, shows that Deng’s reforms coincided with an impressive surge in state capacity.
 

What does the future hold? The small dip in the Hanson-Sigman state-capacity measure at the tail end of the chart, which coincides with Xi Jinping’s first years in power, cannot be considered more than a hint. Unfortunately, it is not easy to accurately splice my Legatum-based state capacity estimates onto to the Hanson-Sigman series. However, the Legatum data do suggest that China’s rule compliance peaked about 2018. The backsliding has been concentrated in the areas of rule of law and executive constraints. How lasting the trend is and how it will affect China’s state capacity going forward remain to be seen.

Taken as a whole, then, the arc of China’s development from Deng to Xi does not represent a clear exception to the story that rule compliance, not rule-breaking, is the path to a strong state.

Conclusion

The findings reported in this commentary are systematically inconsistent with the populist hope that a “strong leader who breaks the rules” can “fix what is wrong.”

• Among countries that are at least minimally democratic, increases in procedural democracy or rule compliance or both are associated with higher state capacity.
• Among authoritarian regimes, procedural democracy has no statistically significant effect on state capacity.
• Rule compliance has a strong positive effect on state capacity across the full spectrum of regime types. If anything, rule compliance is more important to maintaining strong state capacity where democracy is weak or absent than where democracy is well established.

Of course, these findings hold only to the extent that we identify the ability to “fix what is wrong” with a high score for state capacity. The academic notion of “state capacity” may seem remote from what voters have in mind when they say “the system is broken.” Porous borders, street crime, and an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor are more likely to be what they are thinking of. But the most admired populist leader can’t do much to fix those things by sitting in an office giving orders. The orders will come to nothing without a competent civil service, well-trained police and soldiers, and a treasury that can steer a fine line between crushing taxes and crushing debt.

The fact is that lack of state capacity is a big part of the reason that populist leaders who achieve power often disappoint the hopes of their supporters. To pick just one example, think of Boris Yeltsin in 1991, boldly standing on a tank in defiance of Communist coup plotters. Yeltsin was subsequently twice elected President of Russia, but his promised reforms failed to produce an effective state.

Often, populists also disappoint the anti-elitist sentiments of those who bring them to power. Having failed to deliver good government, they cling to power by granting favors to a new elite. Yeltsin had reached that point already by the time of his second election in 1996.

When their one-time supporters see that the system is still broken and that the new elite is no better than the old, populist leaders or their successors all too often start breaking the rules of democracy itself. Once elected freely and fairly, they allow no more free and fair elections. Think of Vladimir Putin, to whom Yeltsin handed power on New Year’s Eve, 1999. 

We should ask: Could it happen here?

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