The stereotypical image of dictators with Swiss bank accounts that contain large amounts of embezzled money is perhaps not farfetched. After all, media accounts are still inundated with stories of how autocrats like Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Mobutu Sese Soko in Zaire, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt embezzled hundreds of millions – some allege billions – of dollars in office. Likewise, in the case of China's single-party dictatorship, Minxin Pei recently warned that “China's economic boom has dazzled investors and captivated the world. But beyond the new high-rises and churning factories lie rampant corruption.”

The conventional reputation of dictators as “roving bandits” (Olson 1993) who engage in rampant corruption has led policy analysts and academics to primarily focus on explaining why levels of corruption are extremely high in authoritarian regimes. But allegations of pervasive corruption in authoritarian states mask the fact that the level of corruption varies significantly across autocracies. They also ignore complex domestic politics associated with the issue of corruption in autocracies and the fact that many if not all dictators enact anti-corruption measures.

This book does not subscribe to the oversimplified image of dictators as corrupt “bandits.” Instead it addresses questions about the conditions under which dictators enact anti-corruption measures and the consequent variation in the degree of corruption across autocracies. We derived a set of causal arguments and testable hypotheses to answer these questions in our book. Our analysis in the previous chapters raises the following questions: What are the main theoretical and empirical contributions that emerge from our causal story and empirical findings? What are the broad substantive implications of the insights presented here? What political impact will corruption in autocracies have in the near future? We address these questions in this concluding chapter.

The chapter begins with a summary of our theoretical arguments and empirical results. This is followed by a discussion of the book's main theoretical and empirical contributions. We then discuss some implications of our findings and the various ways in which the research presented in this book can be extended. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the link between corruption in autocracies and the prospects for democratization in these states.