Review: The Dictator's Handbook

Abstract

THE DICTATOR'S HANDBOOK Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alistair Smith New York: PublicAffairs, 2012. 352pp $21.00 (paper) ISBN 978-1-6103-9184-9Is there a of in politics? That is, is there something that explains our major concerns - patterns of war and peace, political order and instability, the emergence and survival of democracy and dictatorship, and the politics of prosperity and poverty? Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alistair Smith claim to present a explaining many of these phenomena according to few core variables. This book provides stimulating answers to pressing political problems, drawn from a relatively simple and powerful model. At its best, the book can boast of providing analysis that appears counterintuitive at first but seems obvious once it is laid out. There are serious analytical problems at the core of the model, but the book is insightful nonetheless.This book is a codification for a popular audience of the theory of politics, elaborated by the authors, along with James D. Morrow and Randolph M. Siverson in numerous articles and, most comprehensively, in the dense, mathematical The Logic of Political Survival (MIT Press, 2003). The theory's basic assumption is that leaders' interest in political survival drives everything they do: war, repression, corruption, political reform, tax policy. What leaders have to do to survive depends, in turn, on how many people form a winning coalition - that is, how many they have to pay off to stay in power. Leaders must maintain a winning coalition drawn from the - those individuals lucky enough to play a role in deciding who gets to be in office. The three core variables in politics, for the authors, are the size of the winning coalition needed, the size of the selectorate that the winning coalition can be drawn from, and the amount of cash available to spread around. In small-coalition polities like dictatorships, leaders can stay in power through the judicious use of private rewards. Not every dictatorship is the same; in some dictatorships, there are plenty of selectorate members itching for the chance to get in on the action, bidding the price of loyalty down. In others, there are very few selectorate members, and the dictator is more vulnerable to them.In contrast, in a democracy, the selectorate is large, but so is the coalition needed to win. Voters need payoffs, just like strongmen in a dictatorship - but the difference in size is crucial. In a democracy, it would be far too costly to give enough voters a direct bribe. Leaders in large-coalition polities therefore distribute more public goods - that is, they must actually govern in the public interest, at least to a greater degree, to stay in power. Dictators need only keep the right people paid off; this is why democracies prosper faster than dictatorships. However, revolutions occur when there is not enough money to go around to keep people off the street or to pay the army. Since dictatorships are bad for prosperity, there is some hope - provided that there is not enough oil or diamonds to make the public interest irrelevant to the dictator's flow of money.That is the core of the book, developed over a few chapters that capture the skulduggery of coming to power and keeping it through bribes and payoffs. Much of the argument is older than the authors let on. It is hardly novel to say that democracy offers better public policy than dictatorship because leaders in the former are more required to act in the public interest. Indeed, it was almost twenty years ago that the late Mancur Olson put this argument in the contemporary political-economy terms of public goods provision. Second, financial crisis as a source of cracks in regimes and hence revolution is a staple of the democratization literature. Finally, the resource curse is by now as well-known an idea as there is in comparative politics. …