Алистер Смит - The Dictator's Handbook - Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

Consider the incentives of an individual voter. Since at least two of three villages have declared for party A, an alternative party is unlikely to win so an individual’s vote has little influence on the electoral outcome. Voting for party B is a waste of time. Yet the voter could influence where the hospital is built by turning out to vote for A. If everyone else supports A, but she does not, then her village gives one less vote for A than another village and so loses out on the hospital. If she votes for A, then her village has a shot at getting the hospital. In the extreme case, where absolutely everyone votes for party A, our voter would give up a one third chance of getting the hospital in her village if she did not vote for party A. Voters have little incentive but to go along with their village elders.

By rewarding supportive groups over others, individual voters are motivated to follow the choice of their group leader, be that a village elder, a ward organizer, a church leader, or a union boss. The real decisions are made by the group leaders who deliver blocs of votes. They are the true influentials. It is therefore unsurprising that it is common for the rewards to flow through them, so that they can take their cut, rather than go directly to the people. Milton Rakove describes the process of handing out rewards to different ethnic groups under Mayor Richard Daley’s party machine in Chicago in the early 1970s: “The machine co-opts those emerging leaders in the black and Spanishspeaking communities who are willing to cooperate; reallocates perquisites and prerogatives to the blacks and the Spanish speaking, taking them from ethnic groups such as the Jews and Germans, who do not support the machine as loyally as their fathers did. . . .”17

Of course, leaders can use sticks as well as carrots. Lee Kuan Yew ruled Singapore from 1959 until 1990, making him, we believe, the longest serving prime minister anywhere. His party, the People’s Action Party (PAP), dominated elections and that dominance was reinforced by the allocation of public housing, upon which most people in Singapore rely. Neighborhoods that fail to deliver PAP votes come election time found the provision and maintenance of housing cut off.18 In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe went one step further. In an operation called Murambatsvina (Operation Drive Out the Rubbish), he used bulldozers to demolish the houses and markets in neighborhoods that failed to support him in the 2005 election.

Ownership of a public company works in the same way as bloc voting. We could hold our shares in our own name and vote at stockholder meetings. However, except for a very wealthy few of us, our votes are inconsequential and turning up is burdensome. Thus we hold stock via mutual funds and pensions (there are tax and management reasons to do so too, but then think about who has the incentive to lobby for these regulations). These institutional investors, like village elders, are influential enough that CEOs court their support. But it is much cheaper to buy the loyalty of the institutional investor by private goods, such as fees for board membership, than it is to reward all the little investors he represents with great stock performance.

So what can a politician do when elections are fair and the risk of electoral defeat is rising? When an incumbent is at risk of electoral defeat, he can always mitigate that risk by redrawing the boundaries of the constituency to exclude opposition voters. That is to say, the district can be gerrymandered, although this opportunity only comes once in a while so it may come too late to save an unpopular incumbent. The practice of gerrymandering has made it such that the odds of being voted out of a US congressional seat are not that different from the odds of defeat faced by members of the Supreme Soviet under the Soviet Union’s one-party communist regime. And, while gerrymandering virtually ensures reelection, it also makes the voters in a congressional district happy. After all, the gerrymander means that they get the candidate favored by a majority in the district. If gerrymandering isn’t an option, then other rule changes can be instituted, such as prohibiting rallies—in the name, of course, of public safety.

Have a look at the map of Maryland’s 3rd Congressional district in Figure 3.1. Need any more be said about why, in many districts, one party always wins?

Leader Survival

Building a small coalition is key to survival. The smaller the number of people to whom a leader is beholden the easier it is for her to persist in office. Autocrats and democrats alike try to cull supporters. It remains very difficult to measure the size of coalitions precisely. However, if we arrange political systems into broad groups of autocracy and democracy, then we can compare the survival of different political leaders.

FIGURE 3.1 Maryland’s 3rd Congressional District

Figure 3.2 looks at the risk for democrats and autocrats of being replaced given different lengths of time that they have already been in office. On average, for instance, democrats who make it through the first six months in office have about a 43 percent chance of being out by the end of their second year; autocrats only have about a 29 percent chance of being ousted in the same amount of time.19 Making it to ten years, democrats are three times more likely to be replaced than their autocratic, small-coalition counterparts.

These simple comparisons, however, miss an interesting and important detail. Although autocrats survive longer, they find surviving the initial period in office particularly difficult. During their first half year they are nearly twice as likely to be deposed as their democratic counterparts. However, if they survive those first turbulent months, then they have a much better chance of staying in power than democrats. Those early months are difficult because they have not yet worked out where the money is, making them unreliable sources of wealth for their coalition, and they have yet to work out whose support they really need and who they can dump from their transitional coalition. But once autocrats have reshaped and purged their supporters, survival becomes easier. Democrats, in contrast, are constantly engaged in a battle for the best policy ideas to keep their large constituencies happy. As a result, although democrats survive the early months in office more easily (they get a honeymoon), the perpetual quest for good policy takes a toll, such that only 4 percent of democrats survive in office for ten or more years. Nearly three times as many autocrats manage to accomplish this feat, 11 percent.

FIGURE 3.2 The Risk of Ouster by Type of Government

Staying in power right after having come to power is tough, but a successful leader will seize power, then reshuffle the coalition that brought him there to redouble his strength. A smart leader sacks some early backers, replacing them with more reliable and cheaper supporters. But no matter how much he packs the coalition with his friends and supporters, they will not remain loyal unless he rewards them. And as we will see in the next chapter, rewards don’t come cheaply.

4

Steal from the Poor, Give to the Rich

WHETHER YOU’RE TAKING CHARGE OF THE OTTOMAN Empire, a corporation, or Liberia, controlling the flow of funds is essential to buying support. However once you’ve emptied the state’s or the corporate coffers by buying off both your essential supporters and their replacements, if necessary, you must reckon with the entirely new challenge of refilling the treasury. If a leader cannot find a reliable source of income, then it is only a matter of time until someone else will offer his supporters greater rewards than he can.