A democratic leader must please the public which could mean lying to them or being a moron __but__ will also mean working to help them (the more educated the public, the less the lies work) So your chances are always better with democracy.
Do you have any proof for your claim? I can point to multiple dictators in history under whose reign their people had (by the standards of the time) very good lives and government. Elizabeth I's rule was considered a golden age for England.
Finally, how is this different from democratic governments? Congresspeople here in the US spend all their effort getting "campaign donations" so they can be re-elected, and the distribute resources to stay in power (called "pork barrel politics"). The latter ends up benefiting small groups of people at the expense of the nation.
Comparing these dictatorships to each other is not meaningful, we would need to compare dictatorship to democracy. Tudor England was better off than medieval England: not a very high bar. For one thing religious executions still happened and there are certainly no written troves of commoners praising the new age.
Elizabethan England was certainly inferior to the Italian renaissance republics of the period. And its people worse of than the latter democratic UK. It is less of a leap forward than 5th century Athens or even 19th century UK. The nearest semi-democracy in time and space would be recently independent Holland which had more freedom and growth: it is even where the American Pilgrims initially fled to. Even among dictatorships, Elizabeth I is not that great: equally despotic Spain had more power, technology and culture, Arab and Asian nations had longer life spans, more sanitation and higher literacy.
To compare democracy vs dictatorship you'd need to countries similar in culture and era. Like North and South Korea.
South Korea was a dictatorship during it's massive economic boost into the developed world. Park Chung-hee developed South Korea.