The Dictator's Handbook (Book)

The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics is a 2011 book by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith that outlines selectorate theory, borrowing various examples from history, political science and economics.

Summary

Chapter 1 - The Rules of Politics

Politics is filled with some pretty big mysteries, like:

• Why are people dying of starvation in Africa, 3,500 after the Egyptian pharoahs worked out how to store grain
• Why are natural disasters worse in places like Haiti than the USA?
• Why do democratic leaders support dictatorships whilst claiming to support freedom for all people?
• Why are failing CEOs paid so handsomely while the economy crashes?

Ultimately, these seem to come down to leaders not living up to espoused ideals. Often, these are explained by simply declaring leaders as stupid or evil, but this obscures the truth. Politics actually engineers these systems, as certain rules are necessary to gain and keep power. If you want power, you need the observe three main groups, these are:

• The nominal selectorate, also referred to as the interchangeables, includes every person who has some say in choosing the leader (for example, in an American presidential election, all registered voters).
• The real selectorate, also referred to as the influentials, are those who really choose the leaders (for example, in an American presidential election, those people who cast a vote).
• The winning coalition, also referred to as the essentials, are those whose support translates into victory (for example, in an American presidential election, those voters that get a candidate to 270 Electoral College votes). In a dictatorship, this would be the army, tax collectors and business oligarchs.

In order to gain power, you need to follow five rules:

1. Keep the winning coalition as small as possible.
2. Keep the real selectorate as large as possible to discipline the winning coalition.
3. Keep control over as much wealth as possible.
4. Keep the winning coalition as dependent on you as possible.
5. Keep money in the hands of the winning coalition, and not in the hands of other groups.

In the suburb of Bell, Los Angeles, USA it was exposed in 2010 that there had been huge amounts of corruption in the local city government. Although the budget had been balanced and crime had been reduced. It was exposed that local council members had been claiming almost $800,000 in yearly salaries for sitting in non-existent town meetings. This was done by maintaining a property tax rate 50% higher than other suburbs, and ensuring local elections only had about 400 voters out of a suburb of 36,000 people. Anyone who knew of the corruption was quickly bribed and given a huge salary, and the registering of the suburb as a charter city allowed for no democratic accountability to occur.

In 1651, King Louis XIV of France or the Sun King took power of a bankrupt kingdom at aged 23. He quickly modified his army into a meritocracy and enabled officers to join the nobility (meaning others risked their positions), he attached the nobility to his court thus ensuring their income was dependent on how much he liked them. He disciplined his winning coalition and greatly expanded his interchangeables, rendering civil war or his assassination impossible.

In 1975, Harvey Milk failed to elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the city government. In 1977, he succeeded, as the laws changed meaning that neighbourhoods elected to the board, and not the city in general. A much smaller group to gain power with, making it easier for him (until his tragic assassination in 1978). Fidel Castro saw most of his fellow revolutionaries exiled, jailed, executed or resign in the early 60s (notably Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara) and the USSR ensured extremely long terms for its leaders through its rigged political system.

Chapter 2 - Coming to Power

If you want to gain power, you only need to do three things:

1. Remove whoever currently holds power.
2. Quickly seize the government, most importantly the treasury, waiting can get you killed.
3. Convince a winning coalition to support you.

To remove whoever currently holds power, you need to do three things:

1. Have the leader die of natural causes.
2. Convince a winning coalition to support you against the leader.
3. Rise up using the violence of a revolution or a foreign invasion.

To illustrate these points, we can look at Samuel Doe, the dictator of Liberia from 1980 to 1989. Born to a poor family in rural country, he moved to the capital city of Monrovia and joined the army in 1969. In 1980 he and some other soldiers broke into the president's house to ask why they had not been paid, and Samuel killed the president in his sleep, took control of the government, executed the cabinet, installed trusted members of the Krahn tribe in key positions of government and the army, killed 50 of his co-conspirators, tripled the pay of the surviving army officers and gained further funds through US aid by being an anti-communist dictatorship, opening a tax haven, allowing for the fraudulent registry of 2,500 unsafe ships and allowing foreign mining companies to pillage the country. Executing anyone who protested the damage done to environment or workers health. The economy collapsed, foreign debt soared and crime became the only source of sustenance for much of the population (further perpetuating the myth that Africa's poverty is a fault of black people, and not of colonialism and neo-colonialism). Doe was eventually killed after US aid was cut off, as a rebellion flared up and much of the army defected, he was kidnapped, tortured and executed, but refusedountries treasury, they never found it. This meant that no faction could capture enough money to gain power, and Liberia collapsed into civil war.

During the Arab Spring in Egypt in 2011, the army refused to gun down most of the protesters as they had been losing funds from the government (as a result of the great recession producing high unemployment and thus lower consumer spending and taxes, as well as cuts in foreign aid from the US) and allowed the people to take down the government. Eventually seizing power for themselves as Egypt is now a military dictatorship.

During the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini managed to outlive his main competitor, Ali Shariati (who died in 1977), making him the main rival of the Shah and he seized power by having the army defect to him. He held a rigged referendum for the new government that meant he and religious and military leaders held the power. The reason the army defected is that it was exposed that the Shah was dying of cancer, meaning that the army knew instability was coming and defected to a new, healthier government. Similar events occurred in the Philippines and Democratic Congo, meaning that rumours of sickness are very good things for would be revolutionaries. Castro in Cuba and the Kim family in North Korea avoid this by assigning family members as future heirs.