Good Lord, Bad Democrat

Do effective institutions under autocracy strengthen or weaken the foundations of democracy? This paper examines how competent governance in nondemocratic settings shapes long-run civic and political capacity. I study Japanʼs feudal domains (1600‒1868), where institutional design was uniform but administrative performance varied widely. Using newly digitized domainlevel and municipal data, I link historical measures of domain competence̶peasant revolts per capita, currency discount rates, and the prevalence of Dutch-learning scholars̶to local democratic outcomes in the early twentieth century: participation in village-level rural development programs (1932‒1937) and votes for anti-suffrage, fascist-leaning parties in the 1937 general election. To address endogeneity in domain performance, I exploit exogenous variation from the 1600 Battle of Sekigahara, which reshuffled lords and fixed samurai-to-peasant ratios through rigid caste constraints. The results reveal a paradox of “competent autocracy”: regions with more effective feudal administration were less able to coordinate collective action under democracy and exhibited stronger support for authoritarian movements. Administrative efficiency under autocracy promoted order but discouraged self-governance, suggesting that strong states can generate their own democratic deficits.