You said it depends on the person. However, there are so many dictators who made bad decisions that influenced many different countries. Combining many different opinions and ideas will make better decisions that affects the country in a positive way.
I agree that people are scared of strict punishments and it leads to low crime rate. However, there are many innocent people that are killed just because they were against the government's idea in dictatorship countries. When we look at the democratic countries, governments follow the rules and go through all the steps to punish people to decrease the number of innocent people and this is better because democratic countries only punish people who committed a crime.
Also, in North Korea which is a dictatorship, Kim Jong- un became a leader at the young age because of his father's death so he was too young to become a leader and he was not really involved in the politics so when he just became a leader he didn’t have a lot of knowledge to become a person who is the head of the country. In dictatorship, there is a leader who is lack of knowledge so it is worse than the people who is lack of knowledge about politics. Leader is a person who has to know the most information about their country.
However, in dictatorship leaders are often chosen by the heredity and it doesn't allow people to raise their voices of opinion about the leader so there will be a plenty of people who don't agree on the leader and it will create a violent revolutions.
This is a link that shows more detailed example about the dicatators who involved many violence:
http://historylists.org/people/
For example, Hitler who is known as the most brutal dictators in history used his power for racial discrimination. He killed 11 million of people which 6 million were jews just because of their race. Also, he was a person who caused a World War ll by his attack at Poland in 1939 which involved a lot of violence and contributed a negative affect in most of the countries.
Argument #2:
The second reason why a democratic government is better than a dictatorship is that a democratic government doesn’t really involve violence. In most of the dictatorship countries, no one has all the power so it doesn’t create a big problem that can occur violent revolutions. Also, leaders and the government follow the rules so they don’t kill innocent people and create a war or fight between different countries for their benefits. However, when we look at the modern history, most of the wars were imposed during the eras of dictators like Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, etc. who created a total chaos in many countries. Furthermore, dictators killed many innocent people using many different kinds of violence just because citizens were against them.
I agree that elections can be expensive. However, through electoral process citizens can get more benefits by having a proper leader because during the election process, citizens can get some informations about candidates for representatives. It will be much better than not having a proper election like dictatorship because there is a high possibility for the country to have a new leader that citizens do not want.
Argument #1:
The first reason why a democratic government is better than a dictatorship is that a democratic government promotes human rights. Human rights are huge aspect of democracy. In democratic countries, government allows the people with freedom of thought, worship, speech and action. These rights are really important because it makes individuals to grow and pursue their personal dreams and goals because they can do anything they want, with the exception of crime, by raising their voices through various platforms such as media. However, dictatorship is very oppressive so people under dictatorship have less freedom of human rights as they are just expected to follow and never to ask questions to their leader or the government.