The logic of political survival
75% recommend25% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Presents selectorate theory, a game-theoretic model of how leaders stay in power by keeping a winning coalition loyal; readers use it to reason about dictatorship, democracy and regime stability.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
"The authors construct a provocative theory on the selection of leaders and present specific formal models from which their central claims can be deduced. They show how political leaders allocate resources and how institutions for selecting leaders create incentives for leaders to pursue good and bad public policy. They also extend the model to explain the consequences of war on political survival. Throughout the book, they provide illustrations from history, ranging from ancient Sparta to Vichy France, and test the model against statistics gathered from cross-national data. The authors explai
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…resources available for the future) than to be part of a distributed power structure in a larger economy. This is a very common pattern among dictators, and this is where I cite Bueno de Mesquita and Smith's Logic of Political Survival or dictator's handbook, depending on whether you want the theoretical or narrative exposition of the same basic idea. Better yet, read both.
on “Why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network (2008) [pdf]” ↗…help him meet his targets next quarter after you've gone. It just presents him with the annoying problem of trying to replace you, which is actual work. You should read Smith & Bueno de Mesquita's The Logic of Political Survival, or the simpler version presented for a more general audience The Dictator's Handbook. Corporations are not little meritocratic democracies, they're zero-sum dictatorships with nice architecture. There…
on “Ask HN: Evaluation/promotion depends not on my past performance?” ↗…to hold on to power. In some African countries that are now proto-democracies, dictators simply couldn't hold on to power without easily available resource base. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita work in 'The Logic of Political Survival' and ' The Dictator's Handbook' is quite interesting.
on “Intel's disruption is now complete” ↗…read on political economics by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po... If you want the hardcore game theory version, check out The Logic of Political Survival by the same authors: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/gov2126/files/bueno_mesquita...
on “ICANN extracts $20m signing fee for $1bn dot-com price increases” ↗…Dictator's Handbook [1] by Bueno de Mesquita and Smith which itself is a popularized version of their Theory of Selectoriat (i am not sure if it is a cortect translation) from Mesquita's book called The Logic of Political Survival. I highly recommend it, for me it is one of the most important books I've ever read. It explains exactly what you wrote about. CGP Grey made great recap in one of his videos [2] called Rules for Rulers.…
on “Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty” ↗…up. Bryan Caplan called this 'rational irrationality' in his book 'The Myth of the Rational Voter' and I found his argument quite persuasive. Also look into Alistair Smith/Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's The Logic of Political Survival and their notion of 'selectorate theory'.
on “Services across England now lag far behind East Germany” ↗…keeping the government's behavior in line with the population's preferences, but this breaks down all the time and even in equilibrium doesn't work very well. I suggest reading Bueno de Mesquita's _The Logic of Political Survival_ if you're interested in developing a realistic model for how government behavior emerges.
on “Swedish Tesla strike goes international as Norwegian and Danish unions join in” ↗Love de Mesquita's The Logic of Political Survival and selectorate theory in general as well. What a meaty concept, with a lot of counterintuitive explanations.
on “What's the most radical book you've read?” ↗…scientific topics. Some of my favorites include: Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press. De Mesquita, B. B., Smith, A., Siverson, R. M., & Morrow, J. D. (2005). The logic of political survival. MIT press. Axelrod, R., & Hamilton, W. D. (1981). The evolution of cooperation. science, 211(4489), 1390-1396. Tetlock, P. E. (2017). Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know?-New…
on “Ask HN: Book Recommendations?” ↗…to its political clients through a combination of reorganization, financial engineering, and striaght-up theft: https://archive.org/details/hitlersbeneficia00alyg On a more abstract level, try 'The logic of political survival' by Smith & Bueno de Mesquita. both books will give you a useful framework within which to assess the contextual significance of ongoing news events.
on “Phyllis Fong, who was investigating Neuralink, "forcefully removed "” ↗I'm hopeful. "The logic of political survival" (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/logic-political-survival ) is one of many books that make a decent case for democratic systems simply being better than authoritarian (in the long run), the more democratic…
on “New EU data blockage as German court would ban many cookie management providers” ↗…mobile ICBM launchers and SSBNs. Nuclear weapon usage would be more likely to destabilize the Putin regime than cement it, if you look at it through the lens of political game theory (I recommend "The Logic of Political Survival").
on “Nukes and Stability” ↗…power which the monarchs had to contend with. The relevant metric is actually a simple number, namely: Share of population needed to make a leader's life difficult. I got this idea from the books "The logic of political survival" and "The dictator's handbook", and found it quite convincing. The authors distinguish "small coalition regimes" from "large coalition regimes". Values simply do not enter into it, only political calculation,…
on “Was Richard III a Bad King?” ↗The dictator's Handbook and the nerdier academic work it's based on, The Logic of Political Survival, both by Bruce Bueno de Mesquite and Alistair Smith, offer a compelling economic analysis of why democracies offer political support for dictatorships whose policies are glaringly opposed to the democracies'…
on “U.S. Stood by as Indonesia Killed a Half-Million People, Papers Show” ↗The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alistair Smith is about just this issue, and if you want a more theoretical take (along with a detailed model) try The Logic of Political Survival by the same writers.
on “Arrow's Theorem (2014)” ↗