The Dictators Handbook, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
The Dictators Handbook, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
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The Dictator's Handbook
Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

Author: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith

Narrator: Dan Woren

Unabridged: 15 hr 38 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 06/21/2022

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included

Synopsis

“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.

About Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is the Julius Silver Professor of Politics and director of the Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy at New York University, as well as a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is also a partner in Mesquita & Roundell, a New York-based consulting firm that uses game theory models to assist corporations and the U.S. intelligence and policymaking community in complex negotiations. He is the author of several books, including The Predictioneer's Game; Principles of International Politics; Predicting Politics; Strategy, Risk and Personality in Coalition Politics; and the coauthor of many others. Bruce received his doctorate in political science from the University of Michigan in 1971 and a doctorate from the University of Groningen in 1999. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations, the 2007 recipient of South Korea's DMZ Peace Prize, and the recipient of many other academic honors for his teaching and research. Bruce lives with his wife, Arlene, in San Francisco and New York.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Maru on October 27, 2016

Politicians care only about their own power; politicians care about their electorate only to the extent that the electorate keeps them in power. The underlying thesis of this book - let’s call it ‘Political Truth’ – is a statement of such obviousness that one would think it could be said in a senten......more

Goodreads review by Andrej on February 19, 2017

This book examines positions of power (e.g. country leadership, mayors, CEOs, deans, etc.) by assuming entirely self-interested actors who seek to gain and retain power, and argues through examples that this relatively simple model gives the first order explanation of many world events. If you reall......more

Goodreads review by Paul on May 03, 2024

This book makes a whole lot of common sense points but pushes them way past most people’s comfort zones to the point where you may find yourself squirming and looking away and muttering surely, surely people aren’t all like that? One big common sense basic here is that if you depend on the support o......more

Goodreads review by Paul on January 27, 2016

This was a very enjoyable book, full of what essentially amount to worked examples in the logic of political survival - going into detail about what behaviors occur under what political conditions, often furnishing multiple examples for each concept. I will say that you can easily understand Bueno De......more

Goodreads review by May on May 30, 2020

When I was younger I'd believed that politics was a dirty game in which money and power were the sole motivators for anyone who played it. Then I grew up a bit, and I started thinking that perhaps it was truly about ideology: conservatism vs. liberalism, communism vs. capitalism, social justice vs.......more

Quotes

Simply the best book on politics written.... Every citizen should read this book.—CGP Grey

A lucidly written, shrewdly argued meditation on how democrats and dictators preserve political authority...Bueno de Mesquita and Smith are polymathic, drawing on economics, history, and political science to make their points...The reader will be hard-pressed to find a single government that doesn't largely operate according to Messrs. Bueno de Mesquita and Smith's model. So the next time a hand-wringing politician, Democrat or Republican, claims to be taking a position for the 'good of his country,'remember to replace the word 'country' with 'career.'—Wall Street Journal

Machiavelli's The Prince has a new rival. It's The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith.... This is a fantastically thought-provoking read. I found myself not wanting to agree but actually, for the most part, being convinced that the cynical analysis is the true one.—Enlightenment Economics

In this fascinating book Bueno de Mesquita and Smith spin out their view of governance: that all successful leaders, dictators and democrats, can best be understood as almost entirely driven by their own political survival-a view they characterize as 'cynical, but we fear accurate.' Yet as we follow the authors through their brilliant historical assessments of leaders' choices-from Caesar to Tammany Hall and the Green Bay Packers-we gradually realize that their brand of cynicism yields extremely realistic guidance about spreading the rule of law, decent government, and democracy. James Madison would have loved this book.—R. James Woolsey Director of Central Intelligence, 1993-1995, and Chairman, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

In this book, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith teach us to see dictatorship as just another form of politics, and from this perspective they deepen our understanding of all political systems.—Roger Myerson, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago

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