Democratic states are MORE likely to engage in long-term projects than less democratic states. Please do not extrapolate to all non-democratic states based on media presentations of China, or extrapolate to all democratic states based on media presentations of the US congress. Empirically speaking, infrastructural and long-term investments, controlling for geographical and economic factors and opportunity costs, are more frequent in democracies than more authoritarian states. So that argument is bunk.
I don't see how that's empirically true. Democracies do not consist entirely of Western democracies, they consist of the likes of Liberia and Sierra Leone as well. As far as Western democracies go, their relative inclination towards long term planning could be owed to cultural reasons rather than government.
