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...