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    The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics
    Unavailable
    The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics
    Unavailable
    The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics
    Audiobook11 hours

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

    Written by Bruce Bueno De Mesquita and Alastair Smith

    Narrated by Johnny Heller

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    For eighteen years, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith have been revolutionizing the study of politics by turning conventional wisdom on its head. They start from a single assertion: Leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don't care about the "national interest"-or even their subjects-unless they have to.

    This clever and accessible book shows that the difference between tyrants and democrats is 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. The picture the authors paint is not pretty. But it just may be the truth, which is a good starting point for anyone seeking to improve human governance.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Audio
    Release dateMar 19, 2012
    ISBN9781452676906
    Unavailable
    The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics

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    Reviews for The Dictator's Handbook

    4/5

    122 ratings10 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The authors research what makes leaders act the way they do. And, it has nothing to do with what "we the people" want. It is about satisfying the needs of their "essential" supporters. Interesting concept, with many examples to support their key points.
    • 5/5
      Very good, goes through the rules for rulers. Easy to read and understand, although the language for me, having English as second language, felt the English was a bit more complicated than usual. Amazon Kindle explainations made it a breeze to read. Changed the way I think about politics and the news in the media.
    • 5/5
      Great book rich with exemple from real world about political, military power of governance! A deep explanations of how political systems and how you can understand them!
    • 5/5
      Great, unique, inspired analysis of the truth of politics. Important reading for any student of policy and concerned citizen.
    • 1/5
      I'm wondering, how I can't find this audio book after I had heard 3 hours it's 11 hours???!!
    • 5/5
      This disturbing and provocative book synthesizes a lot of political science research and starts from the proposition that leaders are always out for themselves and for their own political survival. It follows that they must first satisfy their indispensable supporters to survive, whether literally or merely in office. Leaders ideally want few indispensables, a limited number of influential supporters, and a broad pool of interchangeables from which new members of the influential class can be picked at will—being easily replaceable makes influentials more loyal to the current ruler. Dictators and democrats differ only in that democrats must satisfy a much larger number of people in order to survive in office, but that leads to big differences in behavior: democrats have to hand out goodies to large numbers of people, which is to say follow policies that are good for many people (at least within the polity). Dictators tax the poor and hand out private benefits instead. A number of important implications follow: (1) Foreign development aid to nondemocracies usually backfires, propping up dictators and ending up mostly in the pockets of the elites; at best it substitutes for the minimal expenditures on basic health and education the dictator might well have made anyway in order to keep the population just productive enough to pay its taxes. (2) Dictatorships are at most risk early (when the dictator has just taken over) and late (when the dictator is dying), when the influentials and essentials fear they might be replaced. (3) Dictators fight wars when it makes sense in light of the private rewards for key constituencies; democrats fight wars only when they’re really sure they can win, and invest a lot in protecting soldiers. (4) Democrats are perfectly willing to fund dictators abroad if that buys policies their own publics like. Provocative and highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      This book was first published in 2011 and is the work of two political scientists who seek to show that there is little eagerness to do good on the part of politicians but that their principal aim is to attain and retain power. I think this follows from the fact that politicians are not able to do good if they are not in office so I don't think the desire to attain and retain office shows that they don't care about doing good. The job of the voter is to distinquish between the politician whose sole desire is for his own power and the politician who wants power so as to do good--and there are, despite what this book says, some such politicians, I admit some of the more abstruse political science jargon in this book did not inspire me to study it too closely, and that particularly in the earlier parts of the book I was often bored. But the authors make some good points and the book deserves to be read and studied.
    • 4/5
      Any mono-causal theory of the world faces an uphill climb, but this one managed to pull it off. They reduced much of politics to the simple question of leaders' desires to stay in power, and dismissed differences of kind between "democracies" and "dictatorships" in favor of a mere difference of degree: how leaders behave depends on the size of the coalition to which they owe their power. The smaller the coalition, the more a leader is incentivized to use state resources to pay off his supporters; the larger the coalition, the more it makes sense to improve the people's welfare.

      A fun and provocative read marred by a series of low-grade typos and grammatical errors — primarily but not exclusively misuse of commas.
    • 2/5
      After listening to an excellent interview with one of the authors, I had high expectations for this book. But, unfortunately, when laid out in detail, the authors' theory doesn't hold water. They are highly selective in their examples and biased in their interpretations, they are naive about a lot of economics, and the quantitative studies they cite to back up their positions are fairly ridiculous. Even still, the case studies were interesting, and at least the book has a clear thesis—I enjoyed arguing with the authors as I read. I didn't mind the tongue-in-cheek writing style. > Portugal and Canada have the straightest roads to their respective capital-city airports among societies whose leaders rely on lots of essentials to hold power. Portugal has the world’s thirteenth lowest ratio and Canada is twenty-eighth. Which countries have the ten lowest ratios? Answer: Guinea, Cuba, Dominica, Colombia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Ecuador, Ethiopia, and Equatorial Guinea.> Leaders, given their druthers, would always like the set of interchangeables to be very large, and the groups of influentials and essentials to be very small. That's why the world of business has so many massive corporations with millions of shareholders, a few influential large owners, and a handful of essentials on the board of directors who agree to pay CEOs handsomely regardless of how the company fares.> sooner or later every society will cross the divide between small-coalition, large-selectorate misery to a large coalition that is a large proportion of the selectorate—and peace and plenty will ensue
    • 5/5
      I was expecting stories about evil dictators, not a practical guide to politics. The real-world feel of this book made me continuously think of the book Physics for Future Presidents.