Replication Data for: Autocracies and Policy Accumulation: The Case of Singapore

The tendency of vote-seeking politicians to produce ever-more policies in response to citizens' demands has been identified as a central driver of 'policy accumulation'. If we accept this premise, policy accumulation should be a central feature of modern democracies but be less pronounced in autocracies. In this article, we test this argument in the context of the authoritarian regime of Singapore which constitutes a least-likely case for low levels of policy accumulation. By studying changes in Singapore's environmental policy over a period of more than four decades (1976 to 2020) and by constrasting the patterns observed with the policy developments in 21 OECD democracies, we find that autocratic regimes do indeed tend to accumulate less than democratic regimes. These findings hold even when controlling for alternative explanations, such as the effectiveness of the administration and the government's ability to opt for stricter and more hierarchical forms of intervention.