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 Journal
 

Bruce 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.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is the Julius Silver Professor of Politics and director of the Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy at New York University. He is the author of twenty-five books, including The Predictioneer's Game and The Invention of Power.
 
Alastair Smith is the Bernhardt Denmark Chair of International Politics at New York University. The recipient of three grants from the National Science Foundation and author of six books, he was chosen as the 2005 Karl Deutsch Award winner.
 
They are also the authors of The Spoils of War: Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents.