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

Think about the company you work for. Who is your leader? Who are the essentials whose support he or she must have? What individuals, though not essential to your CEO’s power, are nonetheless influential in the governance of the company? And then, of course, who is there every day at the office—working hard (or not), just hoping for the breakthrough or the break that will catapult them into a bigger role?

These three groups provide the foundation of all that’s to come in the rest of this book, and, more importantly, the foundation behind the working of politics in all organizations, big and small. Variations in the sizes of these three groups give politics a three-dimensional structure that clarifies the complexity of political life. By working out how these dimensions intersect—that is, each organization’s mix in the size of its interchangeable, influential, and essential groups—we can come to grips with the puzzles of politics. Differences in the size of these groups across states, businesses, and any other organization, as you will see, decide almost everything that happens in politics—what leaders can do, what they can and can’t get away with, to whom they answer, and the relative qualities of life that everyone under them enjoys (or, too often, doesn’t enjoy).

Virtues of 3 - D Politics

You may find it hard to believe that just these three dimensions govern all of the varied systems of leadership in the world. After all, our experience tends to confirm that on one end of the political spectrum we have autocrats and tyrants—horrible, selfish thugs who occasionally stray into psychopathology. On the other end, we have democrats—elected representatives, presidents, and prime ministers who are the benevolent guardians of freedom. Leaders from these two worlds, we assure ourselves, must be worlds apart!

It’s a convenient fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. Governments do not differ in kind. They differ along the dimensions of their selectorates and winning coalitions. These dimensions limit or liberate what leaders can and should do to keep their jobs. How limited or liberated a leader is depends on how selectorates and winning coalitions interact.

No question, it is tough to break the habit of talking about democracies and dictatorships as if either of these terms is sufficient to convey the differences across regimes, even though no two “democracies” are alike and neither are any two “dictatorships.” In fact, it is so hard to break that habit that we will continue to use these terms much of the time throughout this book—but it is important to emphasize that the term “dictatorship” really means a government based on a particularly small number of essentials drawn from a very large group of interchangeables and, usually, a relatively small batch of influentials. On the other hand, if we talk about democracy, we really mean a government founded on a very large number of essentials and a very large number of interchangeables, with the influential group being almost as big as the interchangeable group. When we mention monarchy or military junta, we have in mind that the number of interchangeables, influentials, and essentials is small.

The beauty of talking about organizations in terms of essentials, influentials, and interchangeables is that these categories permit us to refrain from arbitrarily drawing a line between forms of governance, pronouncing one “democratic” and another “autocratic,” or one a large republic and another small, or any of the other mostly one-dimensional views of politics expressed by some of history’s leading political philosophers.

The truth is, no two governments or organizations are exactly alike. No two democracies are alike. Indeed, they can be radically different one from the other and still qualify perfectly well as democracies. The more significant and observable differences in the behavior of governments and organizations are dependent on the absolute and relative size of the interchangeable, influential, and essential groups. The seemingly subtle differences between, say, France’s government and Britain’s, or Canada’s and the United States’s are not inconsequential. However, the variations in their policies are the product of the incentives leaders face as they contend with their particular mix of interchangeable, influential, and essential groups.

There is incredible variety among political systems, mainly because people are amazingly inventive in manipulating politics to work to their advantage. Leaders make rules to give all citizens the vote—creating lots of new interchangeables—but then impose electoral boundaries, stacking the deck of essential voters to ensure that their preferred candidates win. Democratic elites may decide to require a plurality to win a particular race, giving themselves a way to impose what a majority may otherwise reject. Or they might favor having runoff elections to create a majority, even though it may end up being a majority of the interchangables’ second-place choices. Alternately democratic leaders might represent political views in proportion to how many votes each view got, forging governments out of coalitions of minorities. Each of these and countless other rules easily can fall within our belief in democracy, yet each can—and does—produce radically different results.

We must remember that labels like democracy or dictatorship are a convenience—but only a convenience.

Change the Size of Dimensions and Change the World1

Changing the relative size of interchangeables, influentials, and essentials can make a real difference in basic political outcomes. As an example, we can look to the seemingly prosaic election of members of San Francisco’s board of supervisors.

San Francisco used to elect its board of supervisors in citywide elections. That meant that the selectorate consisted of the city’s voters, and the essentials were the minimum number needed to elect a member to the board. In 1977 the method changed, and at-large, citywide elections were replaced by district voting. Under the old rules, members of the board of supervisors were elected by and represented the whole city as if it were one large constituency. Under the new rules, they were elected by and represented their district; that is, their neighborhood, so each supervisor was chosen by a much smaller constituency. The policy and candidate preferences of San Francisco residents as a whole were little different between 1975 and 1977—nevertheless in 1975 a candidate named Harvey Milk failed in his bid to be elected to the board, but went on to be elected in 1977 (and tragically assassinated not long after). As Time magazine reported later, Harvey Milk was “the first openly gay man elected to any substantial political office in the history of the planet.”2

What changed in Harvey Milk’s favor between 1975 and 1977 was simple enough. In 1975, he needed broad-based support among San Francisco’s influentials to get elected. He got 52,996 votes. This meant he finished seventh in the election of supervisors, with the top five being elected. Milk did not have enough support, and so he lost. In 1977 he only needed support within the neighborhood from which he ran, the Castro, a dominantly gay area. He was, as he well knew, popular within his district. He received 5,925 votes, giving him a plurality of support with 29.42 percent of the vote in district 5, which placed him first in the 5th Supervisory District contest and so he was elected.

Strange as it may seem, the same ideas and subtle differences that held true in San Francisco can be applied to illiberal governments like Zimbabwe, China, and Cuba, and even to the more ambiguous sorts of governments like current-day Russia or Venezuela or Singapore. Each is easily and uniquely placed on the three organizational dimensions: interchangeables, influentials, and essentials.