TRENDS: Leaders,Private Interests,and Socially Wasteful Projects: Skyscrapers in Democracies and Autocracies

Abstract

Political leaders often have private incentives to pursue socially wasteful projects, but not all leaders are able to pursue these interests. We argue that weaker accountability mechanisms allow autocratic leaders to more easily realize wasteful projects than democratic leaders. We focus on one particular project, skyscraper construction, where we obtain objective measures comparable across different contexts. We test different implications from our argument by drawing on a new dataset recording all buildings exceeding 150 m, globally. We find that autocracies systematically build more new skyscrapers than democracies. Furthermore, autocratic skyscrapers are more excessive than democratic ones, and—in contrast with democracies—autocracies pursue skyscraper projects to about the same extent in rural/poor and urban/rich societies. When investigating different mechanisms entailed in our argument, the link between regime type and skyscraper construction seems due in large part to stronger vertical accountability mechanisms and more open information environments in democracies.

Keywords

democracy autocracy skyscrapers vertical accountability rent-seeking corruption

Introduction

Democracies outperform autocracies on several development and policy outcomes, including infant mortality rates (Gerring, Thacker, and Alfaro 2012), the number of children enrolled in school (Lake and Baum 2001), and even, in some contexts, quality of government (Charron and Lapuente 2010). Yet several studies show that autocracies outpace democracies on investments in (physical) capital (Przeworski et al. 2000; Tavares and Wacziarg 2001). Some explanations for this pattern highlight more benevolent motives combined with the high capacity of autocratic regimes in undertaking large investment projects. The large literature on East Asian development states, for example, focuses on how autocratic regimes bent at increasing economic growth have the autonomy to drive up savings rates, invest in infrastructure, and subsidize capital for export-producing industrial firms (Leftwich 2000; Wade 1990; Young 1995).

Yet, on closer inspection, many investment projects in autocracies do not seem to be very productivity-enhancing. As Robinson and Torvik (2005) note when discussing developing countries, several countries have made substantial capital investments in socially inefficient projects. The seeming misallocation of investments on unproductive projects—which, for construction and development projects, more generally, can make up a substantial share of public funds (see Williams 2017, 706)—may be deliberate and reflect less sanguine motivations. Political leaders often have personal reasons—be it vanity, providing cronies with opportunities for reaping bribes or excessive profits, or signaling the regime’s capabilities to (foreign and domestic) competitors—to expend public resources on costly, but societally unproductive, investment projects. Regime type is, thus, potentially relevant; a large theoretical literature has highlighted how institutional features associated with democracy might limit such wasteful spending through constraining the power of leaders or through incentivizing leaders to show self-restraint (Besley 2006; Ferejohn 1986; Lake and Baum 2001; Przeworski 2000).

Despite this, comprehensive and systematic empirical studies on whether autocratic leaders, in fact, are more likely than democratic leaders to pursue societally unproductive investment projects remain scarce. Cross-national measures of corruption have been used to assess links with democracy, reporting mixed findings (see, for example, Rock 2009). However, most measures rely on corruption perceptions, which may be artificially deflated in autocracies without a free press to report cases of bribery, theft, and excessive rent-seeking (see Knutsen 2010). Corruption perception measures are also related to several other problems, such as translation and measurement-equivalence issues, ideological biases, and sensitivity to current corruption scandals. Hence, perception-based measures may yield different results than experience-based measures of bribery or other forms of corruption (Treisman 2007). Yet, objective measures of rent-seeking or corruption have often been possible to construct only for single countries, and even experience-based indicators that cover multiple countries (e.g., on police bribes; Afrobarometer) come with limited time series.

As an exception, recent studies on leaders, rents, and favoritism have employed a more objective measure, based on satellite data on nighttime light activity, to investigate how local economic activity increases in regions from which the chief executive originates (Hodler and Raschky 2014). Yet other studies have investigated how (local) political leaders and elite coalitions manage to expend public resources on excessively costly sports stadiums or events (e.g., Delaney and Eckstein 2003). Leaders—also democratically elected ones—may draw on the support of organized local constituencies in the form of fan bases, which have strong interests in constructing (even wasteful) stadiums. Despite these studies, the evidence base for a link between regime type and wasteful investment projects is relatively thin, presumably reflecting the lack of relevant measures of such projects that are amenable to systematic comparisons across space and time.

To help fill this gap, we conduct an empirical study of how autocratic and democratic countries differ on one type of investment project that leaders may have private reasons to pursue, and that often constitute a substantial drag on public resources, namely, skyscrapers. Skyscrapers may be built by private entrepreneurs without much state involvement, by state-affiliated actors or private actors with full funding from the state, or via other ownership and financial arrangements. Private entrepreneurs may also construct skyscrapers with indirect involvement of political actors through subsidies, provision of complementary infrastructure, passing regulation that mitigates costs to building large structures, and so on. As Barr (2012) details by drawing on data from New York City, many skyscrapers are economically inefficient. Their costliness, combined with the different incentives for political leaders to get involved, mean that political actors and public financing often are involved in their construction. This is corroborated by our investigation of hundred randomly drawn skyscrapers, although—as our theoretical argument anticipates—there is more frequent political involvement in skyscraper construction in autocracies than in democracies. Further, we construct two datasets with extensive time series—one at the country-year level and one at the building level—drawing from an impressive online archive including all buildings exceeding 150 m, globally (Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat [CTBUH] 2016). We use these two datasets to test different implications from our argument on regime type and skyscraper construction.

The empirical analysis suggests that when countries become more autocratic, they subsequently build more new skyscrapers. This result holds up to controlling for other relevant factors such as income and urbanization, and is not due to skyscrapers being more popular in particular countries (e.g., China or Kuwait) that happen to be autocratic; results are clear even when we control for country (and year) fixed effects. Subsequent analysis on the potential mechanisms suggest that this relationship partly stems from more open and critical media environments in democracies, contributing to increased vertical accountability. Other features associated with democracy, such as stronger legislative constraints on leaders, do not seem to play a role. Furthermore, we test different proxy measures of the vanity of building projects. When conducting matching analysis at the building level, we find systematic evidence that autocratic skyscrapers are more wasteful than democratic ones. Finally, whereas autocratic regimes build (more) skyscrapers regardless of whether they preside over a rich or poor, or urban or rural, society, skyscraper construction in democracies closely follows income and urbanization. Also, this latter finding corroborates the notion that skyscraper construction is more attuned to socioeconomic cost-benefit calculations in democracies than in autocracies.

Argument

Why would leaders want to channel resources toward projects that cost more than the revenue they are expected to bring in? After all, these projects funnel scarce resources away from productive investments or services widely desired by citizens. One straightforward answer is that they enhance the (private) utility of political leaders, be it through increased personal consumption or, alternatively, through nonpecuniary benefits such as personal glory or a strengthened hold on power.¹ Expensive palaces such as the Versailles built under French King Louis XIV, with a price tag of more than two billion 1994 U.S. Dollars (Guiffrey 1901), yield obvious private gains for the leaders residing in them. A more recent example is the new 1,150 room, 300,000 m² Turkish presidential palace, initiated by President Erdogan. Yet, large, costly buildings—as well as other remarkable projects and events such as high-speed trains, enormous dams, and major sports events—can also serve a signaling purpose for leaders. They may bring fame and help leaders shape the perceptions of their country’s, and by extension their own, power and affluence. Projecting power through expensive construction projects can also be a strategy for leaders seeking to secure their own hold on power. As Svolik (2012, 80) notes, “the dictator’s outward appearance of invincibility is as important as his actual power.” Expensive construction projects can, thus, contribute to co-opt opposition members, or at least deter potential uprisings, by altering beliefs about the chances of successfully contesting the regime.

One type of building that fits such a power-projecting purpose is the skyscraper. Skyscrapers provide an easily recognizable symbol for a city, or even a country and its regime, and bring international attention and status (as did palaces and churches before). Leaders may prefer building extravagant skyscrapers to physically display the country’s—and by extension its leadership’s—wealth or capabilities. They, for instance, serve to remind the opposition that the resources of the country are under the control of the incumbent leadership. Large, extravagant skyscrapers are, of course, not the only means that leaders have to project power. Yet skyscrapers are more visible than many of their close alternatives, and skyscrapers can be placed about anywhere, depending on the preferences of the decision makers.

The cost-effectiveness of skyscrapers depends on various factors, including how the building is constructed and the location’s land value. Building a given skyscraper may carry net economic gains in Manhattan, but not in Dubai or Kigali. Yet building very tall skyscrapers is, in general, very costly. To take one extreme example, the 1000 m high Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia is projected to cost about $ 1.2 billion on completion in 2019, equivalent to the total public expenditures for Rwanda in 2014. Thus, cost-inefficient skyscrapers are often built or part-financed by states, or by actors with access to public resources such as state-owned enterprises or nominally private firms with strong ties to the leader. For instance, the estimated 400 million U.S. dollar Khan Shatyr Entertainment Centre in Astana, Kazakhstan, and the estimated 306 million U.S. dollar SOCAR Tower in Baku, Azerbaijan, were both fully government financed. Sometimes, skyscrapers are even built without being used for any further revenue-generating purpose. The 330 m high Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea—on which construction started in 1987—remains unoccupied even today.

Why Democracies May Build Fewer and Less Expensive Skyscrapers than Autocracies: Potential Mechanisms

While all leaders may be tempted to pursue costly projects for private reasons, we surmise that they are less likely to do so in relatively democratic countries. This is because leaders in autocracies may have stronger incentives to pursue skyscraper projects—even when they are “white elephants” that yield negative social surplus (Robinson and Torvik 2005)—than democratic leaders and because autocratic leaders have greater capacities to pursue such projects in practice. For skyscrapers to be built, the actors undertaking the investment decision, be they political leaders, company leaders, or conglomerates of political and business actors, must have both the motivation and the capacity to pursue the project. Hence, factors that increase either motivation or capacity should, given that the other factor is already present above some minimum level, increase the frequency of skyscraper construction. Similar considerations may apply also to other facets of skyscraper construction, including decisions on the vanity and costliness of structures. Thus, we review factors that influence the motivation or capacity to build more, or more expensive, skyscrapers. While we address various factors, we mainly zoom in on three potential mechanisms that could link regime type to wasteful projects in general, and costly skyscrapers in particular. These three mechanisms all suggest that autocracies build more skyscrapers than democracies, and two of them also suggest that autocracies build more wasteful skyscrapers.

First, well-functioning vertical accountability mechanisms in democracies—linking leaders’ fortunes to the preferences of their electorates (e.g., Ferejohn 1986)—should mitigate the pursuit of wasteful projects. Specifically, contested multi-party elections provide dissatisfied citizens with a channel for removing incumbents that expend resources on costly and ineffective projects. Democratic leaders will, thus, more likely anticipate future personal costs from pursuing such projects. Yet well-functioning vertical accountability mechanisms presume not only that principals (citizens) can freely select and remove their agents (leaders) but also that the principals are well-informed about the agents’ actions (Besley 2006). Importantly, democracies typically provide a richer and more critical information environment than autocracies, which allows voters to be better informed about the costs and benefits of various policies.² Opposition parties or independent media outlets, with opportunities and incentives to spread information on costs, will, thus, mitigate incentives to pursue wasteful projects. Monitoring disciplines spending behavior (Olken 2007), and forward-looking leaders should therefore, in the presence of strong opposition parties and an active, independent media, rather channel public resources to presumably more popular items such as primary education or local roads (e.g., Harding 2015). Indeed, vertical accountability mechanisms may, in some settings, deter potentially problematic investment decisions even during election years, due to increased scrutiny and voters’ preferences to mitigate wasteful spending (Pierskalla and Sacks 2018).³

Second, well-functioning checks and balances in democracies—with institutions and actors outside the executive being able to affect policy-making and even veto executive decisions—provide horizontal constraints on leaders. These relate, for instance, to requirements of passing spending bills through the legislature. While also democratically elected prime ministers might prefer spending on prestigious construction projects for private reasons, legislators could be less eager to do so (particularly when projects are located outside their districts). Hence, an empowered legislature could help mitigate wasteful projects in democracies (see North and Weingast 1989), and many democracies have additional “constraining institutions,” such as independent judiciaries. In contrast, the relatively weaker institutional constraints placed on autocratic leaders should enable autocrats to pursue extravagant projects with less interference.

We note that the two first mechanisms pertain to the capacity of leaders to pursue skyscraper projects in an unconstrained manner. In these discussions, we, thus, assumed that leaders are inherently motivated to pursue such projects. Following the discussion from the previous section, we can assume that there are various motivating factors, including vanity or the incentive to project power, for leaders to encourage skyscraper construction. To the extent that different institutional mechanisms contribute to selecting leaders of different types (Besley 2006), that is, leaders with different motivations, this might also contribute to explain why autocracies and democracies differ in terms of skyscraper construction. Yet institutional features associated with the democracy–autocracy distinction may also affect the motivation by leaders to pursue such projects, even if the personal preferences of leaders are similar. For instance, if the lack of free and fair elections and a free press increases the need to signal affluence and power to the opposition and potential supporters alike to avoid a coup or revolutionary threat, autocratic leaders may prefer to expend more resources on building more/more expensive skyscrapers than democratic leaders. Another such mechanism that may increase the motivation of otherwise similar leaders to pursue costly skyscraper projects pertain to how leaders link up to quite different core constituencies under different regimes.

Thus, the final mechanism pertains to the possibility that autocracies could observe more skyscrapers due to particular links between political leaders and their core supporters under such regimes. All leaders rely on some key constituencies, but in autocracies these constituencies tend to be less encompassing (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003) and often dominated by economic elites (Acemoglu and Robinson 2006). Large-scale construction projects is one helpful tool for autocrats wanting to please their rich and relatively few key supporters, as over-priced building contracts can be used to secretively transfer resources. Even absent such corruption, business elites may prefer public resources being spent on financing or subsidizing skyscrapers—for example through direct transfers, tax breaks, or the government providing cheap inputs—rather than financing, say, primary schools or clinics in rural areas. Indeed, political power concentration with economic elites may lead to more skyscrapers in autocracies even if these skyscrapers are fully financed by private actors. This is because economic elites may influence leaders into pursuing regulatory and other policies of relevance. (One such regulatory policy pertains to maximum height limits on buildings in major cities, but also, the implementation of zoning plans and provision of complementary infrastructure can affect opportunities for private actors to build skyscrapers.)

Interestingly, from the leader’s side, channeling resources to core constituencies via construction projects might even be more beneficial to the leader if the project is socially wasteful. The reason, as outlined by Robinson and Torvik (2005), relates to the fact that also other potential leaders could credibly commit to redistributing via socially efficient projects. In contrast, the implementation of “white elephant projects” that redistribute to a particular constituency is often contingent on the particular leader, thus creating a strong bond of mutual gains between leader and constituents. Wasteful skyscraper projects can therefore make political sense to autocrats wanting to channel resources to his or her few and wealthy supporters and, thereby, shore up support.

If at least one of these three mechanisms operate, we should observe that fewer skyscraper projects are initiated in democracies than in autocracies. The two first mechanisms on vertical and horizontal accountability also predict that democrats should build less expensive skyscrapers. In contrast, if the dominating mechanism is the third one, suggesting that autocrats transfer funds to core supporters through construction contracts, we should arguably not expect autocratic skyscrapers to be systematically more extravagant than democratic ones. Illicit transfers of resources via construction contracts to supporters do presumably not require that the buildings are made more wasteful.

The three mechanisms were presented in a stylized fashion, and there are plausible counter-arguments, or at least caveats, to all of them:

Regarding vertical accountability, also autocrats may be restricted in their actions by the broader public, if not through free and fair elections then through anticipated reactions such as protests, riots, and revolts (Acemoglu and Robinson 2006). Furthermore, vertical accountability mechanisms operate with varying degrees of strength also in democracies. Notably, even when freedom of speech and media are formally ensured, the true costs of construction projects can be hidden from the public. This is particularly pertinent in democracies where independent/opposition newspapers or broadcast media are less widespread. Regarding horizontal accountability, dictators are seldom all-powerful, as their decision-making powers are restricted by, for example, regime parties and multi-party legislatures (Gandhi 2008; Svolik 2012; Wright 2008). Conversely, some democratic leaders operate within (majoritarian) systems that have relatively few institutional veto players. Regarding links with key supporters, also democratic leaders, more than occasionally, engage in corrupt activities, and economic elites may carry disproportionately large political influence also in democracies (Przeworski 2010).

These caveats imply that the links between regime type and number and wastefulness of skyscrapers remain empirical questions. They also imply that we could observe systematic correlations between measures of media and the information environment, horizontal checks on leaders, corruption, and concentration of power with economic elites, on one hand, and measures pertaining to skyscraper projects, on the other, even when controlling for democracy.

Data

To investigate the empirical implications from our argument, we collected data on skyscrapers from the Council for Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats’ (CTBUH 2016) Skyscraper Center. This online database includes all known human constructions ≥150 m, plus numerous lower buildings. With varying coverage, buildings are accompanied with information on their function, construction materials, number of floors, and so on. We developed an automated data-scraping routine (Online Appendix A.1) to convert this information into one country-year- and one building-level dataset. Since coverage is incomplete for buildings lower than 150 m, and the selection criteria are unclear, we restrict our operationalization of skyscrapers to buildings ≥150 m where we (in principle) have full coverage. There are 7,853 such structures in our dataset, and after removing planned and incomplete buildings, there are 5,048 structures. Furthermore, we exclude industrial structures (e.g., factories with tall chimneys) and telecommunications masts (including these structures only marginally affects results), leaving 4,704 relevant skyscrapers.

Figure 1 plots meters and completion year for these relevant structures. Construction technologies have improved since the early twentieth century, and skyscrapers are built more frequently in recent decades. Furthermore, the very tallest buildings have become taller, and three current buildings exceed 600 m. These “mega-structures” are in Mecca (Saudi Arabia), Shanghai (China), and Dubai (United Arab Emirates). The global trend in number of tall buildings points to the importance of accounting for time-period effects in our regressions.

Figure 1.

Skyscraper height and frequency throughout the twentieth century.

Next, we leverage information on the years when construction began and ended to inform the time-lag used for our covariates. Some building projects took several decades, but for almost the entire time-period, the typical skyscraper took three to four years to construct (Online Appendix Figure A.1). Thus, we lag all independent variables with three years. This should also mitigate reverse causality issues; new skyscrapers built, for example, in 1998 should not strongly affect level of democracy in 1995.

We construct three types of dependent variables. The first pertains to number of new skyscrapers in a country in a year. The right-skewed nature of this variable means that we mainly employ the natural logarithm of (new skyscrapers+1). Second, we employ the (log-transformed) number of skyscraper-meters (+1) built in a year, capturing that some countries may build not only more but also taller skyscrapers. Third, we employ measures of “vanity height,” defined as distance between the highest occupiable floor and the architectural top of the structure (see Figure 2). These distances capture spires or empty spaces. The 828 m tall Burj Khalifa in Dubai, for example, carries 244 m of vanity height, 29 percent of total height. We, thus, aim to capture height that has a symbolic function—which could still be in leaders’ private interest—but no clear economic function except, perhaps, attracting some extra tourists. We try out different specifications, including ln(vanity meters+1), number of vanity meters, and vanity meters/total building height, both for the entire building-mass of skyscrapers and only for “signal buildings” such as the tallest skyscraper constructed that year.

Figure 2.

The ten buildings globally with the highest number of vanity meters.

To measure democracy, we mainly use Polyarchy (Teorell et al. 2019), the main measure of electoral democracy from the V-Dem dataset (Coppedge et al. 2016; Pemstein et al. 2018). Polyarchy includes indicators on whether or not the chief executive is (directly or indirectly) elected, “cleanness” of elections, freedoms of association and speech, and suffrage extension. A weighted combination of additive and multiplicative aggregation is used to capture the partial substitutability between these indicators, and the measure ranges from 0 to 1.

Our benchmark is a simple ordinary least squares (OLS) regression controlling for factors that may plausibly affect skyscraper construction and correlate with regime type. First, we control for log GDP per capita from Bolt and van Zanden (2014) (via Coppedge et al. 2016). Higher income levels could make some skyscraper projects economically beneficial, despite the costs of erecting them, and income correlates strongly with electoral democracy (Knutsen et al. 2019). Furthermore, we control for log population size (also from Bolt and van Zanden 2014) and urbanization (from World Development Indicators [WDI], via Coppedge et al. 2016); larger and more urban countries should contain more high-rise buildings simply due to scale and pressures for area-intensive housing. We also control for income per capita from fuels and minerals (from Haber and Menaldo 2011), which are sources of revenue that leaders can more easily monopolize and use for pet projects, including skyscrapers. The benchmark includes country- and year-fixed effects to account for, respectively, relevant country-specific factors (e.g., related to geography or some cultural affinity for tall structures) and time-varying, global factors (e.g., building technology and architectural trends).

Empirical Analysis

We start out by analyzing the empirical implication that more autocratic regimes build more skyscrapers. We next turn to the implication that more autocratic regimes build more wasteful skyscrapers, first by comparing characteristics of buildings and second by considering the socioeconomic context within which skyscrapers are built. Finally, returning to the implication on number of skyscrapers, we present tests that speak to the three plausible mechanisms that may link regime type to skyscraper construction.

Tests on Numbers of Skyscrapers and Skyscraper Meters

Model 1, Table 1 is our benchmark OLS specification, using ln(new skyscrapers+1) as dependent variable. This specification finds evidence supporting the first empirical implication: more autocratic regimes are systematically associated with more, new skyscraper projects. Polyarchy is negatively signed and precisely estimated (p < .01) in model 1. According to the point estimate, going from maximum (1) to minimum (0) on Polyarchy is predicted to add about one extra new skyscraper three years later. This result holds up across different specifications. For instance, results are fairly similar when we omit country-fixed effects and allow for cross-country comparisons in model 2, or when we use the raw count of new skyscrapers (rather than the log-transformation) in model 3.

Table 1.

Main Results: Regime Type and the Number and Meters of Skyscrapers.

Dependent variable (DV)	Ln skyscrapers	Ln skyscrapers	Skyscrapers	Skyscrapers	Ln skyscrapers	Ln meters	Meters
Estimation	OLS	OLS without country FE	OLS	Zero-inflated N.B.	Tobit	OLS	OLS
Estimation	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3	Model 4	Model 5	Model 6	Model 7
Polyarchy	−0.08*** (0.02)	−0.05*** (0.02)	−0.77*** (0.14)	−1.63*** (0.39)	−0.45*** (0.17)	−0.16* (0.09)	−143.10*** (26.52)
Ln GDP p.c.	0.23*** (0.01)	0.12*** (0.01)	1.24*** (0.08)	0.72*** (0.15)	1.43*** (0.10)	0.89*** (0.05)	229.18*** (14.40)
Percentage urbanization	0.14** (0.06)	−0.17*** (0.03)	0.21 (0.39)	−0.84 (0.66)	0.90*** (0.29)	0.77*** (0.24)	35.09 (73.28)
Ln Population	0.05*** (0.01)	0.07*** (0.002)	0.18* (0.10)	0.62*** (0.05)	0.82*** (0.04)	0.27*** (0.06)	36.14* (18.75)
Ln Resource Income p.c.	−0.03*** (0.003)	−0.01*** (0.002)	−0.12*** (0.02)	−0.35*** (0.05)	−0.14*** (0.02)	−0.12*** (0.01)	−22.24*** (3.85)
Country FE	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Year FE	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Continent FE	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No
N	8,414	8,414	8,414	8,414	8,414	8,414	8,414
R ²	.43	.17	.30			.40	.29

Standard errors in parentheses. OLS = ordinary least squares; GDP = gross domestic product; FE = fized effects; p.c. = per capita.

p < .1. **p <.05. ***p < .01.

We also tested a Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial model, where the first stage separates observations without new skyscrapers from those building at least one, thus dealing with the many 0-observations. The second stage considers observations that build ≥1 skyscraper, modelled as a count process. While democracies are not systematically more (or less) likely to be in the 0-skyscraper group, the second stage (model 4) shows that—among observations building skyscrapers—autocracies systematically build more of them. Model 5, a Random Effects Tobit model with 0 as lower-bound censoring value, also predicts that autocracies build more skyscrapers. Returning to the benchmark OLS specification, model 6 employs ln(skyscraper meters+1) as dependent variable, and Polyarchy remains negative, although only significant at 10 percent. Once employing skyscraper meters (untransformed) as dependent variable in model 7, Polyarchy is highly significant, predicting that going from high-quality democracy (Polyarchy = 1) to dictatorship (0) increases skyscraper meters built in year t + 3 by almost 150 m.

Various robustness tests of the specifications in Table 1 are presented in Online Appendices A.3 to A.7. To briefly summarize some key patterns, the main results on regime type are stable to adding plausible confounders, such as civil war, economic growth in the prior five-/ten-year period, change in urbanization, and the building stock (total number of existing buildings) in t − 1. Extant research on drivers of skyscraper construction (Barr 2012) suggests that growth volatility affects skyscraper building. While investors have preferences to build taller than their competitors, they must also consider the costs and potential for building “too tall.” Barr (2012) argues that the opportunity costs are lowest during booms, and that investments in skyscrapers will, therefore, follow boom-cycles. Furthermore, several studies find that autocracies have much more volatile growth records than democracies (e.g., Rodrik 2008). Even if growth volatility is causally driven by being autocratic, and controlling for growth volatility may, thus, introduce post-treatment bias, we still run models controlling for it, as this represents a very different mechanism to the one posited earlier. We construct running measures of the standard deviation in annual growth rate over the last ten-year period, and include it in the benchmark. These tests, reported in Online Appendix Table A.14, show that the observed differences between democracies and autocracies is not explained by growth volatility; the effect of Polyarchy remains mostly unchanged in these models.

The main results are also robust to using other democracy measures than Polyarchy. Furthermore, results are robust to making different operationalization decisions on the dependent variables, such as excluding demolished buildings or counting telecommunication masts as skyscrapers, and to re-running our models on, for example, post-1945, post-1960, and post-1980 samples. We also re-estimated our benchmark with a jackknife-routine, omitting the 370 most influential observations (Cook’s D > 4) seriatim. The point-estimates for Polyarchy are very stable.

One key issue remains: our argument rests on the premise that state actors, regulatory policies, and/or public resources often influence decisions to build skyscrapers. Further, we assume that the active use of such sources of political influence, and thus the extent to which “politically induced skyscrapers” occur, will vary according to regime type. We find it plausible to assume that in both democracies and autocracies, there are some purely private skyscrapers, some publicly financed skyscrapers, and some skyscrapers with mixed private–public sources of financing and influences on construction processes. Yet given the argument on how autocratic leaders have stronger motivations and fewer constraints associated with skyscraper construction, we expect that the share of skyscraper brought about by public financing or via other political support mechanisms is higher in autocracies. In other words, the results reported earlier would not reflect our argument well if they are primarily driven by systematic differences between democratic and autocratic countries in the preferences and capabilities of private businesses and real-estate developers (when these differences are unrelated to political decisions). We see no clear theoretical reason for why this should be the case, especially when conditioning on income, urbanization, natural resource income, and country- and year-fixed effects.

Still, we wanted, first, to check that our results are not driven simply by state-controlled economies building more (or less) skyscrapers, and that state ownership and control over the economy, more generally, happens to differ between democracies and autocracies.⁴ However, our results are stable when controlling for the indicator on state ownership and control of the economy from V-Dem (Online Appendix Table A.7).⁵

To more directly investigate our key assumption on political involvement in skyskraper construction, we scrutinized a (stratified) random sample of a hundred skyscrapers—fifty each in below- and above-median Polyarchy observations. Indeed, scrutinizing and establishing ties between political elites and contractors is far from easy (for a careful case study on contractors in road building in India and ties to politicians, see Lehne, Shapiro, and Eynde 2018), and is often made even more difficult by the incentives of the involved actors to hide any connection, especially in the case of outright corruption or patrimonial relationships. While comparable measures on the exact amount of state subsidies for skyscrapers do not exist, CTBUH provides information, for some observations, on firms involved in the construction process. For additional projects, such information is available from other online sources. We, thus, investigated whether skyscrapers are fully or partly public funded, whether involved firms are state-owned, and whether involved firms are otherwise linked to the regime (e.g., owned by a close relative of the leader or by a party member). We employed a conservative routine, only coding state involvement if this was explicitly identified in credible sources.

Among the fifty skyscrapers in relatively democratic countries, we were able to retrieve relevant and credible information for forty-six of them (92%), whereas the corresponding number is thirty-two (64%) for autocracies. We note that this difference in easily available information across regimes dovetails nicely with extant research on regime type and transparency (Hollyer, Rosendorff, and Vreeland 2011). For the skyscrapers where we found information, we identified state- or regime-affiliated ownership or financing for 50 percent of autocratic skyscrapers and 28 percent of democratic ones. Given our conservative coding rules for registering state involvement, our informed guess—also based, for example, on the majority of autocratic skyscrapers with missing information being located in China, where state financing presumably dominates—is that our numbers almost certainly underestimate the extent of state involvement, especially in autocracies. In sum, this exercise provides strong support for the expectation that skyscrapers are more often tied to political actors and public financing in autocracies than in democracies. Thus, the findings are consistent with the notion that politics plays a key role in explaining the observed higher propensity of autocracies to build skyscrapers.

Which Types of Skyscrapers Do Autocrats Build and in What Contexts Do Autocrats Build Skyscrapers?

So far, we have focused on the hypothesis that autocracies build more skyscrapers than democracies. But, despite our attempts to identify and account for alternative explanations, we certainly cannot exclude the possibility that other differences (than the theorized ones) between regimes drive our results. To further assess our argument—on how autocratic leaders more freely can pursue projects that yield personal benefits such as glory, recognition, or projection of power, but that are socioeconomically costly—we, thus, turn to testing our second set of observational implications. These implications pertain to autocratic skyscraper projects being more wasteful than democratic ones. First, we test the expectation that otherwise comparable buildings are more excessive in autocracies than in democracies. Conditional on skyscrapers being constructed, autocrats should be freer to spend more resources on buildings being tall and elegant, and care less about their economic costs. While we unfortunately do not have high-quality, comparable data on building costs and revenue streams generated, we do have proxies that should provide fairly strong signals on the vanity of skyscraper projects. Second, certain contextual factors should make building skyscrapers socioeconomically beneficial—or, at least, less wasteful—and our argument suggests that democratic leaders need to be more attentive to such concerns. Urbanization is one important contextual factor for which we test this implication: skyscrapers should make more socioeconomic sense in highly urbanized than in rural societies.

Concerning the first set of tests, we employ the vanity measures discussed in the data section. To reiterate, these measures leverage information on distance in meters between the top of the skyscraper and the highest occupied floor, proxying for the part of the building with no economic activity. (If autocrats also build skyscrapers where lower floors are left unoccupied to boost total height, our analysis will underestimate the relationship between autocracy and skyscraper vanity.) Using different versions of this measure (e.g., logged vs. nonlogged vanity meters, percentage vanity meters for all buildings or only for the tallest new building in a year), we find negative relationships with Polyarchy in our benchmark country-year specification. These results are reported in Online Appendix A.8.

Next, we constructed a dataset with buildings as units, and conducted Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM) (Iacus, King, and Porro 2012) comparing otherwise similar buildings in relatively autocratic and democratic countries. Since CEM demands categorical variables, we divide Polyarchy by its median sample-value. We match buildings on meters to the highest occupied floor (divided by sample-median), decade completed, being part of a building complex, and office and/or residential functions. We subsequently control for all matching variables plus decade- and matching-subclass fixed effects in an OLS regression when estimating the association with Polyarchy. Models 1, 2, and 3 in Table 2 employ, respectively, vanity meters as percentage share of skyscraper meters, ln(vanity meters+1), and absolute vanity meters as dependent variables. Polyarchy is consistently negative, though insignificant in model 3. We tested additional specifications (see Online Appendices A.8–A.10), for example, dropping controls post-matching, matching on extra country-level covariates, and employing Entropy Balancing (Hainmueller 2011). Polyarchy is fairly, though not entirely, robust. Using similar specifications as in Table 2, we also find that autocratic skyscrapers have more meters per floors and meters per ground floor area, further corroborating the notion that autocratic skyscrapers are, on average, more wasteful than democratic ones.

Table 2.

Skyscraper Excessiveness: CEM-Matching at the Building Level.

Dependent variable (DV)	Percentage	Ln meters	Absolute meters
Dependent variable (DV)	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3
Polyarchy (above median)	−1.44** (0.57)	−0.13** (0.06)	−2.73 (1.72)
Ln height to top occupied floor	−2.86 (1.78)	0.62*** (0.17)	30.19*** (5.35)
Part of building-complex	−6.63*** (1.77)	−0.65*** (0.17)	−21.68*** (5.32)
Building function: Office	−1.83 (2.96)	−0.26 (0.29)	−8.41 (8.89)
Building function: Residential	−1.02 (2.26)	−0.002 (0.22)	−6.33 (6.76)
Constant	31.63*** (10.23)	0.27 (1.00)	−113.60*** (30.69)
Decade FE	Yes	Yes	Yes
Matched subclass FE	Yes	Yes	Yes
N	592	592	592
R ²	.19	.20	.21

Standard errors in parentheses. CEM = Coarsened Exact Matching.

p < .1. **p <.05. ***p < .01.

We also conducted tests trying to account for various alternative explanations. First, the correlation between regime type and skyscraper height, or vanity, may be driven by what goes on in the capital, or alternatively another major urban center, in autocratic countries. Ades and Glaeser (1995) detail how political factors may drive large urban agglomerations, and that the largest cities in autocracies are, on average, 50 percent larger than comparable cities in democracies. High property prices and resulting pressure on building tall buildings in autocratic capitals could, thus, explain the regime difference. However, we coded whether or not a building was located inside or outside the capital, and ran split-sample tests on a capital and an outside-the-capital subsample. The pattern does not suggest that our results reflect differences in skyscraper construction in autocratic and democratic capitals, rather to the contrary. Conditional on a skyscraper being built, democracies are more likely to locate the skyscraper in the capital. Furthermore, when we repeat our baseline model on capital/noncapital subsamples (see Table A.9), the predicted regime patterns are much stronger outside the capital.⁶

Finally, certain contextual factors should make building skyscrapers socioeconomically beneficial—or, at least, less wasteful—and democratic leaders are expectedly more attentive to such concerns. The discussion so far has mainly focused on how skyscrapers are often a waste of resources—although to differing degrees, following our discussion of vanity meters. Yet some skyscraper projects are associated with economic benefits that outweigh costs, especially in metropolitan areas with limited space and high property prices such as Manhattan or downtown Tokyo. Since extensive, comparative data on property prices where skyscrapers are built are unavailable, we use cruder proxies to investigate whether autocracies are less responsive to such economic calculations. Notably, skyscrapers are, on average, likely to be more cost-efficient in urbanized societies, with higher demands for offices, hotel rooms, and housing in geographically limited spaces. We, thus, extend our benchmark (model 1, Table 1) by including a multiplicative interaction term between Polyarchy and urbanization.

Figure 3 illustrates the results. The leftmost diagram shows that autocracy is associated with more skyscrapers being built not only in very rural societies but also in fairly urban ones (up until where about two-thirds of the population live in cities). For the most urbanized societies, however, there is no clear relationship between regime type and skyscrapers. The rightmost diagram shows that whereas urbanization is associated with more skyscrapers in “mixed” and democratic regimes, there is no systematic relationship in more autocratic regimes. In stark contrast with fairly democratic regimes, harsh dictatorships seem equally eager to build skyscrapers independent of whether they preside over rural or urban societies. When interacting Polyarchy with GDP per capita instead of urbanization (Online Appendix A.11), we find similar patterns. This provides further indications that autocracies tend to experience more wasteful construction projects than democracies.

Figure 3.

Interaction between Polyarchy and urbanization, marginal effects.

Investigating Mechanisms

Finally, we try to come closer to an empirically informed answer on why it is that regime type matters for skyscraper construction. More specifically, we assess which (if any) of our proposed mechanisms generate the link between regime type and skyscrapers. To quickly recapitulate the discussion from the theory section, we proposed, first, that democracy may mitigate the building of expensive skyscrapers due to vertical accountability mechanisms. Well-informed voters could penalize politicians expending scarce resources on wasteful project, thus disciplining politicians seeking re-election. Second, the typically stronger horizontal constraints on democratic leaders could mitigate skyscraper building. Third, skyscraper projects may be used (more often) by autocratic leaders to please a few core (elite) supporters, for example, by funneling resources to them through providing artificially inflated contracts.

Disentangling these mechanisms and coming up with definite answers to which one is relatively more important is, admittedly, very hard. Yet we can provide suggestive evidence. While features such as institutional checks on the leader and control of corruption are generally more prevalent in democracies, regimes display different combinations of institutional features. There are corrupt (Indonesia) and noncorrupt (Denmark) democracies, and autocracies with relatively weak (Zaire under Mobutu) and relatively strong (Mexico under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional [PRI]) institutional checks on leaders. The V-Dem dataset (Coppedge et al. 2016) allows us to capture such nuances, and track fine-grained institutional developments for countries across our entire time period. As in the previous section, our baseline measure of democracy is Polyarchy. But we employ other, and more specific, V-Dem indicators pertaining to the different mechanisms in a simple set-up, adding these variables seriatim to our benchmark. If Polyarchy drops markedly in size and significance once controlling for an indicator, and the indicator is systematically linked to the dependent variable, this provides suggestive evidence that the associated mechanism is operative.⁷

Model 1, Table 3 replicates the benchmark on ln(number of new skyscrapers+1) (model 1, Table 1). The Polyarchy coefficient is −0.08 and highly significant. Model 2 includes our favored proxy of the vertical accountability mechanism—reflecting that informed voters are a requisite for disciplining politicians—namely, V-Dem’s “Alternative Sources of Information Index” (ASI). ASI captures the extent to which the media is “(a) un-biased in their coverage (or lack of coverage) of the opposition, (b) allowed to be critical of the regime, and (c) representative of a wide array of political perspectives” (Coppedge et al. 2016). ASI correlates fairly strongly (.87), though not perfectly, with Polyarchy overall, and the within-unit correlation is .82. Polyarchy actually flips sign, to 0.01, but is statistically insignificant once controlling for this index in model 2, Table 3. Once accounting for differences in the information environment, democracies do not build more skyscrapers than autocracies. Furthermore, ASI is negative and significant at the 1 percent level. This suggests that informed citizens are critical for disciplining politicians, and this could, to a large extent, account for why democracies build fewer skyscrapers than autocracies.

Table 3.

Investigating Mechanisms.

	Benchmark	Vertical	Horizontal	Corruption	Support coalition	All
	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3	Model 4	Model 5	Model 6
Polyarchy	−0.08*** (0.02)	0.01 (0.03)	−0.06* (0.03)	−0.09*** (0.02)	−0.04* (0.02)	0.05 (0.04)
Alternative sources of information		−0.07*** (0.03)				−0.08** (0.03)
Legislative constraints on executive			−0.03 (0.03)			−0.01 (0.03)
Political corruption				−0.07** (0.03)		−0.10*** (0.03)
Power distributed by socioeconomic position					−0.03*** (0.005)	−0.03*** (0.005)
Ln GDP p.c.	0.23*** (0.01)	0.24*** (0.01)	0.25*** (0.01)	0.23*** (0.01)	0.23*** (0.01)	0.24*** (0.01)
Percent urbanization	0.14** (0.06)	0.14** (0.06)	0.16*** (0.06)	0.14** (0.06)	0.15*** (0.06)	0.17*** (0.06)
Ln Population	0.05*** (0.01)	0.06*** (0.02)	0.04*** (0.02)	0.05*** (0.01)	0.06*** (0.01)	0.07*** (0.02)
Ln Resource income p.c.	−0.03*** (0.003)	−0.03*** (0.003)	−0.03*** (0.003)	−0.03*** (0.003)	−0.03*** (0.003)	−0.03*** (0.003)
Country FE	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Year FE	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
N	8,414	8,354	8,336	8,414	8,414	8,276
R ²	.43	.43	.44	.43	.44	.44

Standard errors in parentheses. GDP = gross domestic product.

p < .1. **p <.05. ***p < .01.

We do not find similar support for the other potential mechanisms. Model 3 includes our favored proxy for the horizontal accountability mechanism, namely, V-Dem’s Legislative Constraints on the Executive Index (LCI). Overall, the bivariate correlation with Polyarchy is .81, but the within-unit correlation is .72. In model 3, Table 3, Polyarchy, which remains weakly significant, only changes from −0.08 to −0.06 when controlling for LCI. Furthermore, LCI is not clearly separable from zero.

One might speculate that the institutions theorized to constrain executives from pursuing wasteful projects could fail to work, in practice, if they are populated by actors who themselves find such projects attractive. Our third mechanism points to situations where leaders pursue skyscraper projects exactly because they benefit key supporters. One is environments that allow for embezzlement and bribes, as large building projects provide great opportunities for self-enrichment for those involved. If so, the association between autocracy and skyscrapers may be “explained” by autocracies being more corrupt. We discussed earlier how perception-related measures of corruption may be problematic, and PCI relies on several expert perception-based measures of more specific notions of bribery and embezzlement. Ideally, we should have complemented this analysis with one using more objective measures of corruption, which might have given different results (Treisman 2007), but no such measure with comparable country- and time-series coverage exists. Nonetheless, the bivariate correlation between Polyarchy and V-Dem’s Political Corruption Index (PCI) is .47, and their within-unit correlation is .10. However, Polyarchy actually increases slightly in size once accounting for PCI in model 4, and more corrupt countries are—in contrast with expectations—predicted to build fewer skyscrapers. We also tested whether autocracies build more skyscrapers because political power is more strongly skewed toward economic elites, who may prefer building fancy skyscrapers rather than prioritizing, for example, schools or clinics for the wider population. Polyarchy correlates .62 with V-Dem’s indicator on political power distribution by socioeconomic position (PPSP), and the within-unit correlation is .55. Model 5 predicts that the more concentrated political power is with economic elites, the more new skyscrapers are built. Polyarchy drops when controlling for PPSP, but remains sizable (−0.04) and significant at the 10 percent level. The Polyarchy coefficient from model 5 also lies well within the 95 percent confidence interval of Polyarchy from the baseline. Hence, the evidence on this mechanism driving the net relationship is not clear.

Model 6 controls for all four proxies simultaneously, and results are stable for all the mediators. As in model 2, Polyarchy flips sign (0.05) but is statistically insignificant. In sum, we find suggestive evidence for the notion that democracies build fewer skyscrapers due to vertical accountability mechanisms; well-informed voters may discipline democratic leaders interested in re-election from engaging in such projects. To a lesser extent, we also find some indications that autocracies build more skyscrapers due to stronger concentration of power with economic elites. In contrast, there is little evidence that democracies build fewer skyscrapers because leaders are checked more strongly by powerful legislatures.

We also conducted a number of other tests that either speak indirectly to the mechanisms discussed earlier or tap into alternative mechanisms that may link regime type and skyscraper construction. Specifically, we tested an alternative mechanism pertaining to differences in property rights protection. Democracies, in general, provide stronger protection of property rights than autocracies (Knutsen 2011). Furthermore, a strict property rights regime may deter the construction of skyscrapers. Lax environmental and zoning requirements, as well as the possibility to acquire property and demolish old infrastructure—even occupied houses in urban areas attractive for skyscraper construction—are important practical requisites for the construction of skyscrapers. Insofar as democracies protect the rights of existing property owners, and display other regulatory standards that hinder skyscraper construction in practice, this may be a key reason behind the correlations discussed earlier.⁸ However, protection of property rights also affects the private sectors’ willingness to invest, and is likely to increase private investments in skyscrapers when this is profitable. To test this alternative mechanism, we add the property rights protection index from V-Dem, covering the entire time series and original sample, to the benchmark model. The results are reported in Online Appendix Table A.20. We find that protection of property rights increases the expected number of skyscrapers, but that the regime effect is retained, and in fact becomes even stronger, once controlling for property rights.

Finally, we investigate whether different types of autocracies differ systematically in terms of skyscraper construction. To this end, we draw on data from Anckar and Fredriksson (2018), who have recently extended the coding from Geddes, Wright, and Frantz (2014) backward in time. This allows us to investigate whether there are differences between party-based autocracies, monarchies, personalist regimes, military regimes, and other autocracies in terms of how many skyscrapers they build and the vanity of these skyscrapers. The results, presented in the online appendix, suggest that monarchies and party-based autocracies, but also to some extent personalist regimes, display the largest and clearest differences with democracies on different outcome variables. There is less evidence that military regimes and “other” types of dictatorships differ systematically from democracies.

Conclusion

We have argued that the weaker accountability mechanisms in autocracies enable leaders to spend more freely on costly and ineffective projects that these leaders prefer for personal reasons. Historically, grand castles and churches were typical examples of such projects. A more recent example is the skyscraper. Being remarkable buildings that stand out in the landscape, skyscrapers are often viewed as symbols of the power, glory, and greatness of countries and their leaders. But, building skyscrapers is also costly, and fully funding or subsidizing such projects will often detract resources from more mundane investments in local roads, schools, or health clinics throughout the country. Hence, while leaders and elites may adore them, local populations may prefer to limit the construction of large skyscrapers, especially in poor countries where resources are scarce. Despite this various political initiatives and public funding arrangements are prevalent in skyscraper construction in democracies and, especially, in autocracies.

We note that several of our posited mechanisms are valid for public investments more generally. While incentives related to the extravagant nature of skyscrapers, such as power projection or personal preferences of political leaders, are more specific for “white elephant” projects, other mechanisms, such as fewer regulatory constraints and greater opportunity to invest in physical infrastructure that favors some important constituency, should be relevant for investment in physical infrastructure more generally. How important these different motivations and constraints truly are could, thus, be further elaborated on by employing designs such as those used in this article to different types of infrastructure and other investment projects.

Our empirical analysis shows that autocracies build more new skyscrapers (and meters of skyscrapers) than democracies. Further analysis suggests that autocratic regimes tend to build more excessive such buildings, and, in contrast with democracies, build skyscrapers regardless of whether the country is urbanized or not. This further corroborates the notion that autocratic leaders are freer to pursue projects that generate “private rents,” broadly conceived, at the expense of wider society. Going forward, systematic empirical studies on other types of construction projects and different proxies for rents—for instance characteristics of the private residencies of leaders—would allow us to better gauge whether our findings on skyscraper projects are generalizable. This would, however, require the systematic collection of new data.

Supplemental Material

Online_Appendix – Supplemental material for Leaders, Private Interests, and Socially Wasteful Projects: Skyscrapers in Democracies and Autocracies

Supplemental material, Online_Appendix for Leaders, Private Interests, and Socially Wasteful Projects: Skyscrapers in Democracies and Autocracies by Haakon Gjerløw and Carl Henrik Knutsen in Political Research Quarterly

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank Sindre Haugen for excellent research assistance. We are also grateful for very valuable comments and suggestions from Lauren Honig, Zoltan Fazekas, Martin Søyland, Tore Wig, Jennifer Gandhi, Milan Svolik, Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, Dan Pemstein, Jostein Askim, Atle Haugsgjerd, Karl Hagen Bjurstrøm, Adam Glynn, Allen Hicken, Michael Bernhard, Vassilis Sarantides, Bjørn Høyland, Magnus Bergli Rasmussen, Sirianne Dahlum, three anonymous reviewers, as well as participants at the 2016 Varieties of Democracy: Nature, Causes and Consequences Conference at Notre Dame University, the 2017 Political Economy Workshop at Sheffield University, and various seminars at the University of Oslo.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research project was funded by the Research Council Norway, “Young Research Talent” grant, PNR 240505, principal investigator (PI): Carl Henrik Knutsen. This research project was also supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Grant M13-0559:1, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg.

Notes

Supplemental Material

Supplemental materials for this article are available with the manuscript on the Political Research Quarterly (PRQ) website. And all replication code and data required for reproducing the results of this article are available at .

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