The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

When addressing politics, we must accustom ourselves to thinking and speaking about the actions and interests of specific, named leaders rather than thinking and speaking about fuzzy ideas like the national interest, the common good, and the general welfare.

Think about the company you work for. Who is your leader? Who are the essentials whose support he or she must have? What individuals, though not essential to your CEO’s power, are nonetheless influential in the governance of the company? And then, of course, who is there every day at the office—working hard (or not), just hoping for the breakthrough or the break that will catapult them into a bigger role?

It’s a convenient fiction but a fiction nonetheless. Governments do not differ in kind. They differ along the dimensions of their selectorates and winning coalitions. These dimensions limit or liberate what leaders can and should do to keep their jobs. How limited or liberated a leader is depends on how selectorates and winning coalitions interact.

The three most important characteristics of a coalition are (1) loyalty, (2) loyalty, and (3) loyalty. Successful leaders surround themselves with trusted friends and family, and rid themselves of any ambitious supporters.

Economists often like to express taxation and economic activity in terms of pies: when taxes are low, they say, the people work hard to enlarge the pie, but the government only gets a thin slice of the pie. As the government increases taxes, its share of the pie increases but people begin to do less work, so the overall size of the pie shrinks. If the government sets tax rates extremely low or extremely high, its take will approach zero. In the first case it gets very little of a large pie; in the latter case there is hardly any pie because hardly anyone works.

In autocracies, it is unwise to be rich unless it is the government that made you rich. And if this is the case, it is important to be loyal above all else.

China’s prolonged economic growth seems to have verified that belief (at least for now). Keep them fat and happy, and the masses are unlikely to rise up against you. It seems equally true, however, that sick, starving, ignorant people are also unlikely to revolt.

Who makes revolution? It is the great in-between: those who are neither immiserated nor coddled. The former are too weak and cowed to revolt. The latter are content and have no reason to revolt. Truly, it is the great in-between who are a threat to the stability of a regime and its leaders.

Political improvement is more successful at encouraging economic growth than economic improvement is at producing political reform.

Economic growth and success, in contrast, does not seem to be an assurance of improved governance and, indeed, may hinder it.1 This is a question worth exploring in greater depth,

even a nasty dictator provides the people with basic education and essential health care so that they can work at making the autocrat rich. There

Although such crucial freedoms as free speech, free assembly, and a free press are cheap to provide, autocrats avoid them like the plague. Democratic leaders no doubt wish they could avoid these freedoms, since it is these public goods that make it easy for opponents to organize to overthrow them. But those who depend on a large coalition can’t escape them because they cannot amass a winning coalition without guaranteeing large numbers of people the right to say, read, and write what they want, and to come together to discuss and debate at will. And then democrats must listen and deliver what their constituents want or else someone else will come to power and do so.

Successful leaders must place the urge to do good deeds a distant third behind their own political survival and their degree of discretionary control.

Both parties pay special attention to the middle class because there are an awful lot of middle-class voters and they can be tipped either way. They like to define the rich—those who might be asked to pay higher taxes—as anyone whose income is higher than their own.

It is hard for a leader to know what the people really want unless they have been chosen through the ballot box and they allow a free media and freely assembled groups to articulate their wishes. Without the accountability of free and fair elections, a free press, free speech, and freedom of assembly, even well-intentioned small-coalition rulers can only do whatever they and their coalition advisers think is best.

They did not live the lavish lifestyles of Mobutu Sese Seko or Saddam Hussein. They used their discretionary power over revenue to institute successful, market-oriented economic reforms that, respectively, made Singaporeans among the world’s wealthiest people and lifted millions of Chinese out of abject poverty. Nothing about their actions contradicts the rules of successful, long-lasting governance. They were brutal when that served their interest in staying in power, Deng with murderous violence and Lee Kuan Yew through the power of the courts to drive his opponents into bankruptcy. Lee’s approach was vastly more civilized than Deng’s, but nevertheless it was the arbitrary and tough use of power dictated by the logic of political survival. And that, in the end, is what politics is all about.

Yes, it is true that a lot of aid is given to corrupt governments, but that is by design, not by accident or out of ignorance. Rather, aid is given to thieving governments exactly because they will sell out their people for their own political security. Donors give them that security in exchange for policies that make donors more secure, too, by improving the welfare of their own constituents.

Buying a policy from a democracy is expensive because many people need to be compensated for their dislike of the policy. Buying a policy from an autocracy is quite a bit easier.

Perhaps this is distasteful to those who would like to maintain the fiction that aid is about alleviating poverty or promoting democracy. Naturally some aid is given with purely humanitarian motives, such as that given after a natural disaster. Yet it is hard to reconcile the large scale of aid that flows to Egypt and Pakistan with idealistic goals.

Membership on the UNSC gives national leaders a say in formulating global policy. Many leaders, particularly those from autocratic nations, appear to prefer to sell this influence rather than exercise it on behalf of their people’s interests.

Further, aid encourages autocrats to reduce freedoms for two reasons. First, aid revenue means leaders are less dependent upon the willingness of people to work, so the leader does not need to take as many of the risks that arise from freedom, risks they must take when their revenue and worker productivity depend on allowing people to communicate with each other. Second, the policy concessions are generally unpopular, so leaders need to suppress dissent. UNSC membership brings prominence and prestige to a nation. For an autocratic leader, it also means more easy money. For the people of autocratic nations, UNSC membership means fewer freedoms, less democracy, less wealth, and more misery.

What aid does well is help dictators cling to power and withhold freedoms. And yet, the quest to make aid work for the poor is phoenixlike in its ability to rise and rise again. Or, come to think of it, maybe, like Sisyphus, we just keep climbing the same hill only to fall down again.

NGOs are less successful at providing advanced education. Autocratic leaders in recipient states don’t want people to be taught how to think independently lest they organize opposition to the government.

Europe has a relative abundance of human and physical capital. It trades its capital-intensive products for Kenya’s labor-intensive agricultural products, and both nations are better off.

Democrats deliver what the people want. Because they have to stand for election and reelection, democrats are impatient. They have a short time horizon. For them, the long run is the next election, not the next twenty years. However, as long as we the people want cheap gasoline and an abundance of markets in which to dump agricultural products, and we want that more than we want to see genuine development in poor countries, then our leaders are going to carry out our wishes. If they don’t, why, they’ll be replaced with someone who will. That’s what democracy is all about—government of, by, and for the people at home

Aid is a tool for buying influence and policy. Unless we the people really value development and are willing to make meaningful sacrifices toward it, then aid will continue to fail in its stated goals. Democrats are not thuggish brutes. They just want to keep their jobs, and to do so they need to deliver the policies their people want. Despite the idealistic expressions of some, all too many of us prefer cheap oil to real change in West Africa or the Middle East. So we really should not complain too much when our leaders try to deliver what we want. That, after all, is what democracy is about.

The extent of expected loyalty from the military is one critical factor that shapes the direction an incumbent takes in responding to a nascent threat.

A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason. —J. P. MORGAN

Too often, the real world of politics and business responds to problems by taking one step forward and two steps back, resulting in no progress on the problem at hand.

Utopian dreams of a perfect world are just that: utopian. Pursuing the perfect world for everyone is a waste of time and an excuse for not doing the hard work of making the world better for many.

Give us your poor and let’s see if they can make a better life. Give us your tired and let’s see if they can be energized by participating in making a more public goods–oriented government work better. Give us your huddled masses longing to be free and let’s see if their children’s children don’t grow up to be the foundation of a stronger, more peaceful, and more prosperous society than they first came to. For generation after generation, the waves of immigrants to the United States have made our winning coalitions bigger and better. They have turned from poor, tired, huddled masses into modern America’s success story. This was no happenstance of time or place. This was the straightforward consequence of easy citizenship and, with it, an expanded winning coalition that makes for better governance.