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 convenien...