"The Dictator's Handbook"

This is undoubtedly super gloomy, especially since the reasoning is so mathematical that it's hard to find fault with it. And it does explain so much (especially about foreign aid). The authors Bruce Bueno De Mesquita & Alastair Smith did try to make some constructive proposals in the last chapter but it was too little too late.

• These stories of the horrible things politicians or business executives do are appealing in their own perverse way because they free us to believe we would behave differently if given the opportunity. They liberate us to cast blame on the flawed person who somehow, inexplicably, had the authority to make monumental—and monumentally bad—decisions... We look at each case and conclude they are different, uncharacteristic anomalies. Yet they are held together by the logic of politics, the rules ruling rulers.
• The answers lie in a clever manipulation of election timing. The city’s leaders ensured that they depended on very few voters to hold power and to set their compensation. To see how a poor community could so handsomely reward its town leaders we must start with the 2005 special election to convert Bell from a “general city” to a “charter city.”
• When a leader’s hold on power—his or her political survival—depends on a small coalition of backers (remember the small percentage of voters needed to actually win a seat on the city council), then providing private rewards is the path to long tenure in office:... Furthermore, when that small coalition is drawn from a relatively large pool—...—then not only are private rewards to the small coalition an efficient way to govern, but so much budgetary and taxing discretion is created that the folks at the top have ample opportunity for handsome compensation,
• the rules to rule by. First, politics is about getting and keeping political power... Second, political survival is best assured by depending on few people to attain and retain office... Third, when the small group of cronies knows that there is a large pool of people waiting on the sidelines, the top leadership has great discretion over how revenue is spent and how much to tax... Fourth, dependence on a small coalition liberates leaders to tax at high rates
• Madison, we believe, fell a bit short on the details of good governance. In describing a republic as large or small, he failed to distinguish between how many had a say in choosing leaders and how many were essential to keeping a leader in place. The two, as we will see, can be radically different.
• Our account of politics is primarily about what is, and why what is, is.
• To understand politics properly, we must modify one assumption in particular: we must stop thinking that leaders can lead unilaterally.
• Indeed, Louis XIV, ostensibly an absolute monarch, is a wonderful example of just how false this idea of monolithic leadership is.
• While most of us think of a state’s bankruptcy as a financial crisis, looking through the prism of political survival makes evident that it really amounts to a political crisis. When debt exceeds the ability to pay, the problem for a leader is not so much that good public works must be cut back, but rather that the incumbent doesn’t have the resources necessary to purchase political loyalty from key backers.
• Still, every adult citizen of the Soviet Union, where voting was mandatory, was a member of the nominal selectorate. The second stratum of politics consists of the real selectorate. This is the group that actually chooses the leader. In today’s China (as in the old Soviet Union), it consists of all voting members of the Communist Party;... the third, the subset of the real selectorate that makes up a winning coalition. These are the people whose support is essential if a leader is to survive in office... A simple way to think of these groups is: interchangeables, influentials, and essentials.
• Under the new rules, they were elected by and represented their district; that is, their neighborhood, so each supervisor was chosen by a much smaller constituency. The policy and candidate preferences of San Francisco residents as a whole were little different between 1975 and 1977—nevertheless in 1975 a candidate named Harvey Milk failed in his bid to be elected to the board, but went on to be elected in 1977 (and tragically assassinated not long after).
• In a democracy, or any other system where a leader’s critical coalition is excessively large, it becomes too costly to buy loyalty through private rewards. The money has to be spread too thinly. So more democratic types of governments, dependent as they are on large coalitions, tend to emphasize spending to create effective public policies that improve general welfare pretty much as suggested by James Madison. <> By contrast, dictators, monarchs, military junta leaders, and most CEOs all rely on a smaller set of essentials. As intimated by Machiavelli, it is more efficient for them to govern by spending a chunk of revenue to buy the loyalty of their coalition through private benefits, even though these benefits come at the expense of the larger taxpaying public or millions of small shareholders. Thus small coalitions encourage stable, corrupt, private-goods-oriented regimes.
• Rule 1: Keep your winning coalition as small as possible. Rule 2: Keep your nominal selectorate as large as possible. Rule 3: Control the flow of revenue. Rule 4: Pay your key supporters just enough to keep them loyal. Rule 5: Don’t take money out of your supporter’s pockets to make the people’s lives better... Hungry people are not likely to have the energy to overthrow you,
• he proceeded to replace virtually everyone who had been in the government or the army with members of his own small Krahn tribe, which made up only about 4 percent of the population.
• Damasus had the insight to find an answer. True, the apostles came from the east, but Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome and it was in Rome that they were buried. Thus he could argue that Rome was privileged by being the scene of apostolic missions intended to spread the word... On the surface, this may seem an explicitly religious argument—but powerful though it is, it obscures the coalition-building strategies that actually made Damasus pope and made the Roman Church the new locus of power.
• His promoters, in contrast, note that he converted many aristocratic pagan women to Christianity and they, in turn, brought their husbands into the fold, thereby expanding the selectorate and perhaps the influentials in Rome’s Christian community.
• Nicholas, it seems, thought that a ban on vodka would improve the performance of Russia’s troops in World War I. He missed the obvious downsides, however... So popular and widely consumed was vodka that its sale provided about a third of the government’s revenue.
• Leaders rely heavily on public goods to reward their backers, but precisely because so many of the rewards are public goods that benefit everyone, those in the coalition are not much better off than those outside the coalition. Furthermore, since personal rewards are relatively modest once the essential bloc is so large, loyalty is further diluted.
• this is not to say there are no private goods in democratic politics. There are. And this explains why dynastic rule is common even in democracies. It may be surprising to learn, for instance, that a careful study finds that 31.2 percent of American female legislators (and 8.4 percent of men) had a close relative precede them in their political role.
• Autocratic politics is a battle for private rewards. Democratic politics is a battle for good policy ideas.
• Technically speaking, World War II, a war that Winston Churchill, as much as any single individual, might be credited with having won, wasn’t even over yet. And already the people of Britain were ready to toss Winston out.
• If you can find an issue over which the incumbent’s supporters disagree, then it will soon be your turn to lead. Divide and conquer is a terrific principle for coming to power in a democracy—and one of the greatest practitioners of this strategy was Abraham Lincoln, who propelled himself to the US presidency by splitting the support for the Democratic Party in 1860... in 1858, Abraham Lincoln forced Stephen Douglas to declare his position on slavery just one year after the Supreme Court’s Dredd Scott decision
• Lincoln did not lose sight of this important principal as he sought reelection in 1864... he maneuvered to expand the set of interchangeables and influentials so that he could forge a winning coalition out of those who previously had no say at all...He introduced absentee ballots so that soldiers could vote
• Putting more outsiders on a board translates on average into better returns for shareholders, a benefit to everyone. At the same time, it also translates into greater risk for the CEO.
• Within a year of Fiorina’s ouster, all the leading coup makers who acted against her were gone. Mark Hurd had risen to the top and, as suggested by the quote from Italo Calvino, he had to watch day and night to keep his head. Four years later, despite stellar HP performance, Hurd was, in turn, forced out amidst a personal scandal. This is the essential lesson of politics: in the end ruling is the objective, not ruling well.
• Liberia: Despite the nation’s philanthropic origins, the most important lesson the former slaves took from their experiences appears to be that slavery and forced labor worked much better for the masters than the slaves. These former slaves instituted universal adult suffrage in 1904, but with a property qualification that effectively excluded indigenous Africans from becoming insiders, making the selectorate large but the influential group relatively small.
• by funding many opposition parties the CCM can win many seats with less than a 10 percent vote share. In practice the president controls nearly all the women’s appointments and he tends to appoint women who lack an independent base of support. Indeed, few women win direct election to Tanzania’s parliament.
• Bribing voters works far better at the bloc level... The reality is that there are so many voters that the chance that any individual’s vote matters is inconsequential. Yet, voters are much more influential about where the hospital gets built or whose streets get swept than they are about who wins the election.
• Lee Kuan Yew ruled Singapore from 1959 until 1990, making him, we believe, the longest serving prime minister anywhere. His party, the People’s Action Party (PAP), dominated elections and that dominance was reinforced by the allocation of public housing,
• The resource curse enables autocrats to massively reward their supporters and accumulate enormous wealth... The easiest way to incentivize the leader to liberalize policy is to force him to rely on tax revenue to generate funds... the logic of our survival-based argument suggests they would achieve more by spending their donations lobbying the governments in the developed world to increase the tax on petroleum than by providing assistance overseas. By raising the price of oil and gas, such taxes would reduce worldwide demand for oil.
• Who makes revolution? It is the great in-between; those who are neither immiserated nor coddled... Therefore, a prudent leader balances resources between keeping the coalition content and the people just fit enough to produce the wealth needed to enrich the essentials and the incumbent.
• We shouldn’t fail to notice that universities in their own right constitute small-coalition political systems with a pretty big batch of interchangeables. No surprise, then, that they behave like autocracies, favoring the rich and connected at the expense of those who lack political clout.
• Seeing that he had no chance to be elected, and possessed of the backing of the United States government, pro-American Batista launched a coup before the election took place. Backed by the army, Batista now assumed the presidency as a small-coalition dictator rather than as a democratically elected large-coalition leader. Surely this is yet another example of power taking precedence over political principles.
• Zaire’s (today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo) Mobutu Sese Seko once told Rwanda’s president Juvénal Habyiarama, “I’ve been in power in Zaire for thirty years, and I never built one road.” Why? As he explained to Habyiarama, “Now they are driving down your roads to get you.”
• Massive construction projects, like the Aswan Dam in Egypt and China’s Three Gorges Dam, are very much like Mobutu’s power grid. These sorts of projects are great for autocrats. Although they dislocate vast numbers of people, they also generate vast corruption opportunities, making them gems of private rewards as well as providers of basic public infrastructure.


• Certainly anyone reluctant to be a brute will not last long if everyone knows he is unprepared to engage in the vicious behavior that may be essential to political survival.
• a small group in Iran, known as the Bonyads, is exempt from taxation and even exempt from accusations of corruption. They manage the money of the senior ayatollahs and some key military leaders. The Bonyads are reputed to control 20 to 25 percent of Iran’s annual income—not bad as private benefits go.
• so-called liberals and so-called conservatives appear simply to have carved out separate electoral niches that give them a good chance of winning office. Democrats in the United States like to raise taxes on the rich, improve welfare for the poor, and seek heavy doses of benefits for the middle-class swing voters.
• rely on a small group of essentials, drawn from a small group of influential selectors, who are drawn from millions of interchangeable selectors. That, of course, is a perfect description of most modern, publicly traded corporations. It also happens to be a pretty good description of organized crime families.
• Caesar made the mistake of trying to help the people by using a portion of the coalition’s share of rewards... The stories of Caesar and Castellano remind us that too many good deeds or too much greed are equally punished if the coalition loses out as a result.
• Democrats cannot greatly enrich their essential backers by handing out cash. There are simply too many people who need rewarding. Democrats need to deliver the public policies their coalition wants... And since private goods generate such concentrated benefits to the people who matter (and a good leader never forgets that who matters is all that matters), autocrats forsake the public policy goals of the people.
• Nations elected to the UNSC get more aid. A UNSC seat gives leaders valuable favors to sell in the form of their vote on the Security Council, and the aid they receive results in worse performance for their economy.
• Counting the number of people helped also encourages agencies to undertake work that the government would have otherwise done on its own. Remember that NGOs are most successful at providing basic public goods like primary education and basic health care—services even autocrats want... Nominally the agency helps 100 children. But in reality they help fifty children at twice the nominal cost and let the leaders abscond with $5,000. Is this good?
• As with effective disaster management that limits the number of disaster victims, capturing bin Laden would have ended aid to Pakistan’s leaders, as his death may do now.
• In 1939, US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously remarked about Anastasio Somoza García, a brutal Nicaraguan dictator, that, “He’s a son of a bitch, but at least he’s our son of a bitch.” And herein lies the rub. Dictators are cheap to buy. They deliver policies that democratic leaders and their constituents want, and being beholden to relatively few essential backers, autocrats can be bought cheaply.
• If a regime excels at convincing people that stepping out of line means incredible misery and even death, it is unlikely to experience rebellion.
• The degree to which autocrats rely on taxation to fund the government limits the extent to which they can oppress the people. <> Nations awash with natural resource wealth or lavished with foreign aid rarely democratize. They are the world’s most oppressive places. Their leaders have resources to reward their essential supporters without having to empower the people.
• Natural disasters, while bringing misery to the people, can also empower them. One frequent consequence of earthquakes, hurricanes, and droughts is that vast numbers of people are forced from their homes. If they are permitted to gather in refugee camps, then they have the opportunity to organize against the government.
• Democratic revolutions are most often fought by people who cannot count on great natural resource wealth to sustain them once they overthrow the predecessor regime.
• Economic necessity is one factor that produces such a concession. Another is coming to power already on the back of a large coalition. This was George Washington’s, Nelson Mandela’s, and Jawaharlal Nehru’s circumstance. For different reasons, each started out with a big coalition and was pretty much locked into trying to sustain it at least for a while as a necessity if their government was to survive.
• The reason Sun Tzu has served so many leaders so well over twenty-five centuries is that his is the right advice for kings, chieftains, and autocrats of every shape to follow... Democratic war fighting emphasizes public welfare, exactly as should be the case when advising a leader who relies on a large coalition.
• Sun Tzu’s attentiveness to private rewards and Weinberger’s concentration on the public good of protecting the national interest (however that may be understood) represent the great divide between small-coalition and large-coalition regimes. Our view of politics instructs us to anticipate that leaders who depend on lots of essential backers only fight when they believe victory is nearly certain... Leaders who rely only on a few essential supporters, in contrast, are prepared to fight even when the odds of winning are not particularly good. Democratic leaders try hard to win if the going gets tough. Autocrats make a good initial effort and if that proves wanting they quit.
• Democrats more often than autocrats fight when all other means of gaining policy concessions from foreign foes fail. In contrast, autocrats are more likely to fight casually, in the pursuit of land, slaves, and treasure.<>This has important implications. As Sun Tzu suggested, autocrats are likely to grab what they can and return home. On the other hand, democrats fight where they have policy concerns, be these close to home, or, as can be the case, in far-flung lands.
• The Ethiopian motto was: Leave no working tank behind. As an Ethiopian general put it, “when you lose an area you better destroy your equipment—it’s a principle of war. If you cannot separate your men from their equipment then you bomb them both together.”
• big democracies pick on little opponents whether they are democratic or not, with the expectation that they won’t fight back or won’t put up much of a fight. Indeed, that could very well be viewed as a straightforward explanation of the history of democracies engaged in imperial and colonial expansion against weak adversaries with little hope of defending themselves.
• Consider the experience of Chiang Kai Shek, who certainly was no fool. We might well ask why he encouraged much more successful economic policies on Taiwan than on the mainland of China. In the latter, even with extensive poverty, because there were so many people, there was plenty to enrich himself and his coalition. But when Chiang Kai Shek and his backers retreated to Taiwan, they took over an island with relatively few people and barely any resources. Only economic success could provide the way to reward his coalition. In the process of achieving that success, he also gradually expanded the coalition
• First, coalition members should beware of their susceptibility to purges. Remember that it ticks up when there is a new boss, a dying boss, or a bankrupt boss.
• All such skeptics should remember that social networking web sites have already successfully mobilized revolutions and brought down governments. Changing corporate governance is far easier.
• Seemingly small differences in enfranchisement rules and districting decisions led to big disparities in the economic (and social) development of the States of the United States. ..  states in which leaders required support from a larger proportion of the population developed faster.
• Using foreign aid to set up nationwide wireless access to the Internet and to provide the poor with mobile phones could be a win-win-win-win among the four constituencies affected by aid.
• We have learned that just about all of political life revolves around the size of the selectorate, the influentials, and the winning coalition.
• Why, for example, does Congress gerrymander districts? Precisely because of Rule 1: Keep the coalition as small as possible. <> Why do some political parties favor immigration? Rule 2: Expand the set of interchangeables.