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

"A lucidly written, shrewdly argued meditation on how democrats and dictators preserve political authority." -Wall Street JournalBruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith's canonical book on political science turns conventional wisdom on its head.They start from a single proposition: leaders do whatever keeps them in power.They don't care about the "national interest"-or even their subjects-unless they must.As Bueno de Mesquita and Smith show, democracy is essentially 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. And it is also the key to returning power to the people.