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“The answer was that as long as there is a revolution, there will be a counter-revolution.”
Both leaders knew that it is better to have loyal incompetents than competent rivals.
Even in modern times the principle of choosing close advisers who cannot rise to the top spot remains good advice. It is surely no coincidence that Saddam Hussein as president of Islamic Iraq had a Christian, Tariq Aziz, as his number two.
What we can begin to appreciate is that no matter how well a tyrant builds his coalitions, it is important to keep the coalition itself off-balance.
Everybody in the Soviet selectorate could, with a very small probability, grow up to be general
secretary of the Communist Party, just like the petty criminal Joseph Stalin and the uneducated Nikita Khrushchev. Those already in the inner circle knew they had to stay in line to keep their day jobs. Bravo, Lenin.
Virtually every publicly traded company in the world has adopted the Leninist rigged-election system and for much the same reasons.
“First you will eat your chickens, then your goats, then your cattle, then your donkeys. Then you will eat your children and finally you will eat the
One counterintuitive strategy is for leaders to encourage additional competitors. This is why some states have so many political parties, even though only one really wins.
Multiparty democracy provides a similar means for one or two parties to dominate governments in democracies from Botswana to Japan and Israel. There is more to representing the people than just allowing them to vote, even when the vote is done honestly.
Designated seats for underrepresented minorities is another means by which leaders reduce the number of people upon whom they are dependent. Such policies are advertised as empowering minorities, whether they are women, or members of a particular caste or religion. In reality they empower leaders.
Bloc leaders gain a lot, their members gain less, and the rest of society pays the price.
His party, the People’s Action Party (PAP), dominated elections and that dominance was reinforced by the allocation of public housing, upon which most people in Singapore rely. Neighborhoods that fail to deliver PAP votes come election time found the provision and maintenance of housing cut off.18
Anyone who has tried to read the annual reports of publicly traded firms will quickly realize that this is a practice induced by dependence on a small winning coalition.
Taxes are one of the great antidotes to stress for heads of governments.
Needless to say, people want to be sleek and satisfied and not lean and apprehensive.
This may be economic madness, but it is also political genius.4
It’s worth remembering that the wealthiest man in China and the wealthiest man in Russia are both currently in prison.
that rule of law is essential to successful commerce.
Given the desire to rule with as few supporters as possible, it should be of little surprise that democrats often include farm groups in their coalition and reward them accordingly.
In a phenomenon often called the resource curse, nations with readily extractable natural resources systematically underperform nations without such resources.
Heavy borrowing is a feature of small coalition settings. It is not the result, as some economists argue, of ignorance of basic economics by third-world leaders.
France also invaded the Ruhr, an industrial area of Germany, in 1923 to collect reparation payments due from World War I that Germany had not paid.
As in the Nigerian case, the discovery of exploitable natural resources provides one means to increase debt service and hence more borrowing. However, without such discoveries, the only way to increase borrowing is to increase tax revenue.
But people who argue for debt forgiveness construct their arguments in terms of how they think the world should operate, rather than how it actually works.
Having filled government coffers, leaders spend resources in three ways.
Who makes revolution? It is the great in-between; those who are neither immiserated nor coddled. The former are too weak and cowered to revolt. The latter are content and have no reason to revolt.
Singapore, for example, has managed through benevolent dictatorship to produce a high quality of material life for its citizens, albeit without many of the freedoms that others hold dear.
They resist the cry of people like us who demand improved governance before any bailout money is offered up to rescue a troubled autocratic economy.
In contrast, in small-coalition regimes, bailouts all too often are the means to preserve business as usual.
The Republic of China (aka Taiwan) and the Republic of Korea (aka South Korea) are models of building prosperity ahead of democracy. Needless to say, the People’s Republic of China certainly is not fond of promoting either of those countries’ experiences.
A far better measure of leaders’ interest in education is the distribution of top universities. With the sole exceptions of China and Singapore, no nondemocratic country has even one university rated among the world’s top 200.
That this uneven distribution of top-notch universities favors large-coalition locales is no accident.
In fact, one might almost conclude that Oxford is a breeding ground for authoritarians. It certainly is the alma mater of many, including Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, the Bhutto family of Pakistan, kings of Jordan, Bhutan, Malaysia, and even little Tonga. England’s big coalition system opens the door pretty broadly to give access to higher education.
We shouldn’t fail to notice that universities in their own right constitute small-coalition political systems with a pretty big batch of interchangeables.
Shoddy infrastructure is often an intentionally designed feature of many countries, not a misfortune suffered unwillingly.
That the difference between driving distance and the distance as the crow flies is related to politics, and especially to how many essentials a leader needs, is rather interesting and perhaps surprising, but related they are.
Mobutu famously replaced local electricity-generating capacity near Zaire’s copper mines with a hydroelectric station that was more than 1,000 miles away. This empowered him to cut off electricity at the touch of a button, guaranteeing that he, and not some local entrepreneur, controlled the flow of copper wealth.
What, then, is it that these countries have in common? It is not their geographic locale, their culture, religion, history, or size. What they all have in common is that they are democracies and therefore dependent on a large coalition, albeit of different shapes and sizes. And being dependent on many essentials, all of these regimes share in common the provision of the cheap and yet hugely valuable public good called freedom.
“Considering the high seismicity of Iran, a comprehensive hazard reduction program was launched in 1991, but the effectiveness of the measures have [sic] been limited by lack of adequate funding and institutional coordination.... The principal causes of vulnerability in the region include . . . inefficient public policies, and lagging and misguided investments in infrastructure.
Democracies are not lucky. They do not attract civic-minded leaders by chance. Rather, they attract survival-oriented leaders who understand that, given their dependence on many essentials, they can only come to and stay in power if they figure out the right basket of public goods to provide.
Successful leaders must place the urge to do good deeds a distant third behind their own political survival and their degree of discretionary control.
The well off and Republican candidates by and large favor, for instance, government support for medical research on cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and other ailments of the elderly who happen also to be the wealthiest age cohort in the United States.
That’s why earmarks—pork in colloquial terms—are reviled in general and beloved by each constituency when the money goes to them.
One of the ways in which the coalition is kept artificially small in Tanzania is by reserving many parliamentary seats for women who are indirectly elected by the parties in parliament and by permitting several members of the Bunge to be appointed by the president.
the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA, the international governing body of football—or, to people in the United States, soccer).
The IOC is not alone in engendering corruption. FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, is even worse. On December 1, 2010, FIFA announced that it had chosen Russia and Qatar as the sites for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup Finals.
rely on a small group of essentials, drawn from a small group of influential selectors, who are drawn from millions of interchangeable selectors.
Deng and Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew are surely among the contemporary world’s two greatest icons of the authoritarian’s hall of fame. They did not sock fortunes away in secret bank accounts (to the best of our knowledge). 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 made Singaporeans among the world’s wealthiest people and lifted millions of Chinese out of abject poverty.
The same issues hold when examining governments. Politicians can introduce all sorts of legislation and administrations to seek out and prosecute corruption. This looks good to the voters. But such measures are either a façade behind which it is business as usual, or they are designed as a weapon to be used against political opponents.
