Autocrats Prefer Carrots over Sticks, Too: The Cases of El Salvador and Nicaragua

How does social policy differ under electoral autocracies compared to electoral democracies? While the existing political economy literature has focused on autocrats’ motivations for providing public goods, it has paid less attention to within-country comparisons. The latter provides an ideal research design to isolate the role played by political regimes while an array of other factors is kept constant. More research can also be done considering the varieties of responses to social policy under authoritarian contexts in countries with an exclusionary social policy legacy.

Our research draws on two comparisons that speak to the voids mentioned above. First, we examine President Bukele’s electoral authoritarian government in El Salvador against the preceding eight years of electoral democracy. Second, we compare social policy in two electoral autocracies: Bukele’s El Salvador and Ortega’s longer-standing regime in Nicaragua.

In El Salvador, excluding the impact of the pandemic, Bukele has given social policy less priority than previous administrations. Moreover, decision-making has been more unpredictable, opaque, and volatile under autocratic rule, in contrast to preceding governments under which checks and balances were more robust. In this regard, Bukele’s administration resembles other populist regimes, regardless of whether they function under electoral democracies or autocracies—similar to Mexico’s López Obrador and Brazil’s Bolsonaro (Borges, 2023).

The comparison between El Salvador and Nicaragua reveals that authoritarian governments use social policies to maintain legitimacy when fiscal resources are available and abundant. However, in the absence or presence of limited resources, the lack of institutional checks makes social policy an easy target for cutbacks. This is evident in Nicaragua’s social policy retrenchment following the depletion of Venezuelan aid in 2017 and the cuts of overall social spending imposed by El Salvador's growing debt following high public spending during the COVID-19 pandemic.