Bruce Mesquita - The Logic of Political Survival

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface

I - A THEORY OF POLITICAL INCENTIVES

Chapter 1 - Reining in the Prince

Three Puzzles

The Essence of the Argument

Organization of the Investigation

A Theory of Political Incentives: Part I

Policy Choice and Political Survival: Part II

Choosing Institutions for Political Selection: Part III

Why Focus on Political Survival?

Threats to Political Survival

Challenges to Political Survival

Easy Answers, Inadequate Answers

An Incomplete Theory of Institutional Political Laws

Chapter 2 - The Theory: Definitions and Intuition

The Elements of the Polity

The Selectorate (S)

The Winning Coalition (W)

Illustrative Examples of Small, Restrictive Winning Coalitions

Sources of Risks and Rewards

The Challenger’s Commitment Problem

Affinity

The Replacement or Deposition Rule

Political Systems: Analogies But Not Equivalence

What Is Missing from Our Theory

Conclusion

Chapter 3 - A Model of the Selectorate Theory

Economic Activity, Policy Provision, and Payoffs

Equilibria of the Selectorate Model

Alternative Equilibrium

How Institutions Structure Incentives

Further Implications

Bridging from Theory to Testable Hypotheses

Conclusion

Appendix

II - POLICY CHOICE AND POLITICAL SURVIVAL

Chapter 4 - Institutions for Kleptocracy or Growth

Measurement Issues

Institutional Variables

Measurement of Labor, Leisure, and Taxes

Evidence: Labor or Leisure

Evidence: Taxation

Economic Growth

Government Expenditures, Expenditures Per Capita, and Opportunities for Kleptocracy

Conclusion

Chapter 5 - Institutions, Peace, and Prosperity

The Shift from Public to Private Goods in Sparta

Empirical Assessments: Core Public Goods

General Public Goods

Public-Goods Summary

Empirical Assessment of the Provision of Private Goods

Montesquieu, Madison, Population, and Public Welfare

Leopold II: An Illustration

Conclusion

Chapter 6 - War, Peace, and Coalition Size

The Democratic Peace

The Debate

The Dyadic Selectorate Model

Structure of the Dyadic Selectorate Game

Solving the Game

The Decision to Fight or to Negotiate

The Selectorate Peace: Interaction of Polities

Diversionary War and Compromise Agreements

Empirical Assessments

Conclusion

Appendix

Chapter 7 - Political Survival

Survival as Explained by the Selectorate Theory

Mamluk Egypt

Empirical Assessment of Political Survival

Extrapolitical Risks of Deposition

A Tale of Two Countries

Conclusion

III - CHOOSING INSTITUTIONS

Chapter 8 - Institutional Preferences: Change from Within

The Selectorate Theory and Institutional Preferences

Oppression

Political Actions to Alter Institutions

Population Migration: The Disenfranchised and the Selectorate

Protest, Civil War, and Revolution

Purges and Coups d’état: Actions by Coalition Members

Actions by Leaders: Constructing Autocracy

Conclusion

Chapter 9 - The Enemy Outside and Within: War and Changes of Leaders and Regimes

Selection Institutions and War Aims

The Anglo-Soviet Invasion of Iran

Testing the War-Aims Argument

Leadership Removal

War and Domestic Change

Nation Building After Disputes

Franco, Mussolini, and the Enemy Within

Conclusion

Appendix

Chapter 10 - Promoting Peace and Prosperity

The Hobbes Index

Explaining the Hobbes Index

What Can Be Done?

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

First MIT Press paperback edition, 2005

© 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Times Roman by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The logic of political survival / Bruce Bueno de Mesquita . . . [et al.].

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-262-02546-9 (hc. : alk. paper), 0-262-52440-6 (pb.)

1. Heads of state—Succession. 2. Heads of state—Term of office. 3. Political planning. I. Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, 1946-

JF285.L64 2004

320’.01’1—dc21

2003045943

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

To Our Winning Coalition:

Arlene

Fiona

Suzanne

Karen

Preface

The Logic of Political Survival is our collective effort to solve a fundamental political puzzle: why are leaders who produce peace and prosperity turned out of office after only a short time, while those who produce corruption, war, and misery endure in office? In trying to solve this puzzle we have developed a theory about political selection that is surprisingly broad in its implications. The theory focuses on how two factors that govern the selection of leaders influence taxing and spending decisions, leadership turnover, social welfare, and institutional change. The two factors relate to what we call the selectorate —the set of people with a say in choosing leaders and with a prospect of gaining access to special privileges doled out by leaders—and the winning coalition —the subgroup of the selectorate who maintain incumbents in office and in exchange receive special privileges. Our theory challenges Hobbes’s view that an absolute sovereign—the Leviathan—is the best form of governance, while also probing and questioning the perspectives of Machiavelli, Hume, Madison, Montesquieu, and other democratic theorists about the virtues of republics.

This project, begun a decade ago, started as a narrow investigation of the consequences of war for the political survival of regimes and leaders. It has grown into a theory of how political leaders allocate resources, with allocation decisions assumed to be made with an eye toward enhancing incumbents’ prospects for remaining in office. From there it spread to assessing the relationship between institutions for selecting leaders and such factors as economic growth, corruption, property rights, patterns of population migration, coups d’état, war aims, war outcomes, revolution, health care, regime change, oppression, imperial expansion, foreign aid, civil liberties, trade policy, the quality of drinking water, the demise of monarchy, the endurance of democracy, apparent civic-mindedness, selection of core institutions of governance, and much more. All of these and many other central economic, social, and political variables are shown to share common explanations in the theory we propose.

We have endeavored to provide a general theory coupled with specific formal models from which we deduce our central claims. The political intuition underlying the models is explained plainly and nontechnically in the body of the text, buttressed by formal proofs in chapter appendixes. More technically inclined readers may wish to read the appendixes immediately after chapters 3, 6, and 9, while just skimming the intuitive explanation in the body of those chapters. Following the presentation of the basic model in chapter 3, subsequent chapters expand applications through related models that form part of the same theory and by relaxing assumptions to evaluate the theoretical, as well as empirical, robustness of the theory. We test most of the theory’s implications on a broad body of data, sometimes spanning a period as long as nearly two centuries. The central propositions are evaluated with extensive control variables representing alternative explanations as well as exogenous factors that might lead to spurious associations between our predictions and observations.