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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,
Fourth, dependence on a small coalition liberates leaders to tax at high rates,
As we will see, what works for those at the top usually works against those at the bottom,
When addressing politics, we must accustom ourselves to think and speak about the actions and interests of specific, named leaders
Our account of politics is primarily about what is, and why what is,
What are the consequences for leaders and their regimes when a war is lost?
Even the term “international relations” presumes that the subject is about nations rather than being about what Barack Obama or Raul Castro or any other named leader wants.
By elevating so many newcomers, Louis had created a new class of people who were beholden to him.
The French populace in general did not figure much into Louis’s calculations of who needed to be paid off—they did not represent an imminent threat to him.
No one rules alone; no one has absolute authority. All that varies is how many backs have to be scratched and how big the supply of backs available for scratching.
For leaders, the political landscape can be broken down into three groups of people: the nominal selectorate, the real selectorate, and the winning coalition.
In the USSR the winning coalition consisted of a small group of people inside the Communist Party who chose candidates and who controlled policy. Their support was essential to keep the commissars and general secretary in power. These were the folks with the power to overthrow their boss—and he knew it.
For Louis XIV, the winning coalition was a handful of members of the court, military officers, and senior civil servants without whom a rival could have replaced the king.
A simple way to think of these groups is: interchangeables, influentials, and essentials.
(Abraham Lincoln was a master at just such voter efficiency.)
Most publicly traded corporations have this structure as well. They have millions of shareholders who are the interchangeables. They have big institutional shareholders and some others who are the influentials. And the essentials are pretty much those who get to pick actual board members and senior management.
but it is important to emphasize that the term “dictatorship” really means a government based on a particularly small number of essentials drawn from a very large group of interchangeables and, usually, a relatively small batch of influentials.
The seemingly subtle differences between, say, France’s government and Britain’s, or Canada’s and the United States’s are not inconsequential.
Our starting point is the realization that any leader worth her salt wants as much power as she can get, and to keep it for as long as possible.
and most CEOs all rely on a smaller set of essentials.
As a result, heads of governments reliant on a large coalition tend not to be among the world’s best paid executives.
This means that the next step in explaining the calculus of politics is to figure out how much a leader can keep and how much must be spent on the coalition and on the public if the incumbent is to stay in power.
This explains why, from the October 1917 Revolution through to Gorbachev’s reforms in the late 1980s, only one Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, was successfully deposed in a coup. All the other Soviet leaders died of old age or infirmity. Khrushchev failed to deliver what he promised to his cronies.
As even a casual observer of election campaigns knows, there is a big discrepancy between what politicians promise when making a bid for power and what they actually deliver once there.
Each member of a winning coalition, knowing that many are standing on the sidelines to replace them, will be careful not to give the incumbent reasons to look for replacements.
Those public works may prove successful, as was true for Lee Kwan Yew’s efforts in Singapore and Deng Xiaoping’s in China. They may also prove to be dismal failures, as was true for Kwame Nkrumah’s civic-minded industrial program in Ghana or Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, which turned out to be a great leap backwards for China.
Bravo to Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe who, whenever facing a threat of a military coup, manages finally to pay his army, keeping their loyalty against all odds.
Don’t take money out of your supporter’s pockets to make the people’s lives better.
General Than Shwe of Myanmar, who made sure following the 2008 Nargis cyclone that food relief was controlled and sold on the black market by his military supporters rather than letting aid go to the people—at
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.
Why are there so many battles over the tax code? Rule 3: Take control of ...
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Following secret trials, he had no fewer than fifty of his original collaborators executed.
He was lazy, and spent his days hanging out with the wives of his presidential guards.
The most critical factor behind Mubarak’s defeat in February 2011 was the decision by Egypt’s top generals to allow demonstrators to take to the streets without fear of military suppression.
On the flight back to Manila he warned journalists that it might all be over in minutes. And it was. He was immediately taken from the plane and assassinated on the tarmac.
By the middle of the seventeenth century this practice was replaced by the kinder, gentler practice of locking all male relatives in the Fourth Court of the Topkapi Palace—quite literally the original Golden Cage.
Carlo Gambino nominated “Big” Paul Castellano to succeed him as head of his New York mafia family.
not until Damasus I, pope from 366 to 384, was the Bishop of Rome truly elevated above all other Roman Catholic bishops, becoming the head of the western Roman Catholic Church.
How did Damasus expand his appeal to the masses—the interchangeables—many of whom had opposed his papacy? It seems that many of the recently converted lay people of the declining Roman Empire missed their many pagan Roman gods. Damasus recognized that these same people seemed happy to substitute the many Christian martyrs for those gods. Damasus focused his energy on discovering the burial places of martyrs and erecting great marble monuments. Some of his monuments and inscriptions to martyrs can still be seen in Rome to this day.
nation. Anyone who thinks leaders do what they ought to do—that is, do what is best for their nation of subjects—ought to become an academic rather than enter political life.
simpler. Kerensky’s revolutionaries were able to storm the Winter Palace in February 1917 because the army did not stop them. And the army did not bother to stop them because the czar did not pay them enough.
Mugabe “succeeds” because he understands that it does not matter what happens to the people provided that he makes sure to pay the army.
Democrats lack urgency when assuming power because the democratic rules that determine that the incumbent has been defeated simultaneously create a coalition of supporters.
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.
Few would deny Churchill did a magnificent job and he was much loved. But it was Atlee who won.
Similarly, Bill Clinton, with just 43 percent of the vote beat the incumbent President George H. W. Bush (who won 38 percent of the popular vote) in 1992, in no small measure thanks to the run by H. Ross Perot (who got 19 percent of the vote).11 Lincoln understood that he needed to keep the coalition as small as possible—even in an inherently large coalition system.
each branch of which was required to send a delegate with a rifle to participate in the executions.
