Dictatorships and highways

This paper identifies a puzzling fact: countries that are more democratic tend to have roads in worse conditions than less democratic countries. Using lagged values of a democracy index to instrument for democracy in 1980 yields higher estimates of the magnitude of this association. Instruments based on climate, population, and education yield similar results. Changes to a more democratic government are similarly associated with slower growth of the extension of the paved road network. I advance four non-mutually exclusive hypotheses that can explain the results. More saliently, dictatorships might find highways useful for military and repressive purposes.