The Dictator's Handbook

Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics
A revised and expanded new edition of the beloved work of political science that shows how the rules of politics almost always favor leaders who ignore the national interest and focus on serving their own supporters.

"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.

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