A few months ago one of our readers reader kindly sent me a copy of The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. I finally got around to reading it, and recommend it to you all.
Here’s the publisher’s summary over at Amazon:
For eighteen years, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith have been part of a team revolutionizing the study of politics by turning conventional wisdom on its head. They start from a single assertion: Leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don’t care about the “national interest’””or even their subjects””unless they have to.
This clever and accessible book shows that the difference between tyrants and democrats is just a convenient fiction. Governments do not differ in kind but only in the number of essential supporters, or backs that need scratching. The size of this group determines almost everything about politics: what leaders can get away with, and the quality of life or misery under them. The picture the authors paint is not pretty. But it just may be the truth, which is a good starting point for anyone seeking to improve human governance.
The central idea is hardly a new one: that the best approach to reverse-engineering the behavior of politicians is to assume that their primary motivation, and the criterion according to which all their decisions are made, is the acquisition and retention of power. But what the authors have done with this book is to use this idea to build a consistent quantitative and predictive model, based on the relative sizes of three coalitions: the general “selectorate”, a much smaller group of “influentials”, and most important of all, the “essentials”: that collection of individuals who must be kept happy in order for the leader to retain his grip on power.
The authors did particularly well, I thought, in their analysis of how different sorts of governments (as characterized by their relative coalition sizes) interact with each other, particularly as regards war and foreign aid. That chapter alone was worth the price of admission.
As is always the case with these ‘here’s-the-big-new-idea-that-explains-everything’ books, I found myself disagreeing with some of the tendentious conclusions and recommendations the authors presented in the final chapter — but I understand that everybody’s got an axe to grind, and none of it was enough to seriously detract from what I think was a very insightful and useful intellectual effort. Go and get a copy.