Leaders and the Logic of Political Survival

Abstract

The Logic of Political Survival. By Bruce Bueno De Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, James D. Morrow. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 536 pp., $40.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-262-02546-9). The Logic of Political Survival is a collective effort by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph Siverson, and James Morrow to explain how leaders and institutions interact to produce a range of public policies within both the domestic and foreign arenas. The authors offer an account of how institutions influence the selection of leaders, and how the actions of leaders affect their own political survival, along with that of the institutions that spawned them. The general theoretical core of their explanation is grounded in the literatures of political economy and rational choice. The cases that the authors use to test their models draw upon several well-known datasets in international relations and comparative politics, as well as a host of other statistical sources containing economic data on taxation, spending, and so on. The methods applied to these sources include formal modeling, statistical analyses, and historical case studies, supplemented with secondary sources. The results are interpreted in a concluding chapter that offers advice regarding institutional design and the selection of leaders, contingent on the outcomes desired. It is not surprising that this book took four authors a decade and almost 500 pages of text, sans footnotes and references, to complete. In spite of the scope of the analysis and the use of powerful mathematical and statistical methods, The Logic of Political Survival is written in an engaging style that makes the argument accessible to a general reader. The main ideas and their connections appear in the first three chapters. The remainder of the volume is divided into two parts, reflecting the dual focus of the book: the explanation of policies, and the choice of institutions by members of a wide range of societies throughout history. For each chapter, the formal models and their logical …