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

Chapter 3: Staying in Power

1 Italo Calvino, Under the Jaguar Sun (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986), 36.

2 See, for instance, Andrew Ward, Karen Bishop, and Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, “Pyrrhic Victories: The Cost to the Board of Ousting the CEO,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 20 (1999): 767–781; see also Joann Lublin, “CEO Tenure, Stock Gains Often Go Hand-in-Hand,” Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2010. Accessed at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703900004575325172681419254.html.

3 The chairman and CEO in 1999 was Lewis Platt. His board included Philip M. Condit, Patricia C. Dunn, Thomas E. Everhart, John B. Fery, Jean-Paul G. Gimon, Sam Ginn, Richard A. Hackborn, Walter B. Hewlett, George A. Keyworth II, David M. Lawrence, Susan P. Orr, David W. Packard, and Robert P. Wayman.

4 Carly Fiorina, “The Case for the Merger,” Speech at the Goldman Sachs Technology Conference, Palm Springs, California, February 4, 2002.

5 See Bay Fang, “Saddam’s Secret to Survival” at http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthreat.php?17319-Saddams-secret-to-survival-kill-your-foes-real-or-imagined.

6 See Edward Mortimer, “The Thief of Baghdad,” New York Review of Books, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1990/sep/27/the-thief-of-baghdad/?page=2. See also Fuad Matar, Saddam Hussein, the Man, the Cause and the Future (London: Third World Centre, 1981).

7 See Patrick Cockburn, “Chemical Ali: The End of an Overlord,” The Independent, June 25, 2007. Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5n4hnapFg. Part of Saddam Hussein’s mercifulness was manifested in his allowing al-Bakr to resign rather that executing him, probably seen by Chemical Ali as a show of weakness.

8 http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/12/iraqs-security-and-intelligence-gutted-in-political-purges-new-cables-show/67431/.

9 S. E. Finer, The History of Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 643.

10 Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa (New York: PublicAffairs Press, 2005), 546.

11 Martin Meredith, Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe (New York: PublicAffairs, 2002).

12 Ibid., 69.

13 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, “Report on Tanzania’s Economic and Political Performance: Helping Tanzania Do Better,” Study prepared for the World Bank, April 20, 2009.

14 Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, “Contingent Prize Allocation and Pivotal Voting,” British Journal of Political Science , 2012, forthcoming.

15 See Richard L. Park and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, India’s Political System, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979); and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Strategy, Risk and Personality in Coalition Politics: The Case of India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

16 See Bueno de Mesquita, Strategy, Risk and Personality, 75.

17 Milton K. Rakove, Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers: An Insider’s Analysis of the Daley Machine (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1975), 16.

18 Waikeung Tam, “Clientelist Politics in Singapore: Selective Provision of Housing Services as an Electoral Mobilization Strategy,” University of Chicago, 2003, typescript.

19 The figure is based on leader time in office from Archigos. Winning coalition measure is based on Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), with large coalitions coded as 1, the highest category.

Chapter 4: Steal from the Poor, Give to the Rich

1 Several scholars have examined how institutions affect transparency and the availability of data. See, for instance, James R. Hollyer, B. Peter Rosendorff, and James Raymond Vreeland, Democracy and Transparency , Working paper, 2010; also see Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

2 Quoted in Meredith Martin, Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe (New York: PublicAffairs, 2002), 17.

3 Robert H. Bates, Prosperity and Violence: the Political Economy of Development (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001), 74.

4 Gerard Padró i Miquel, “The Control of Politicians in Divided Societies: The Politics of Fear,” Review of Economic Studies 74 (2007): 1259–1274.

5 The figure is constructed using the kg variable from the Penn World Tables, version 6.3. See http://pwt.econ.upenn.edu/.

6 These tax estimates are based, in the case of China, on the tax brackets for that country identified at www.worldwide-tax.com/china/china_tax.asp and for the United States by filling out US tax form 1040 using H&R Block’s 2010 Tax Cut program, with only the itemized deduction for our hypothetical American family of three.

7 Implicit taxation is the value associated with an activity that is lost to its producer as a result of government policy. High inflation, for instance, implicitly taxes wealth by diminishing its value.

8 Michael Wines, “Chinese Business Mogul Sentenced to Prison,” New York Times , Asia Pacific Section, May 18, 2010. Available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/world/asia/19china.html.

9 William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice , ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. Folger Shakespeare Library (New York: Washington Square Press, 2009), Act 4, scene 1, 157.

10 Anita L. Allen and Michael R. Seidl, “Cross-Cultural Commerce in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice,” American University Journal of International Law and Politics 10 (1995): 843.

11 Calculations based upon SOI Tax Stats-Internal Revenue Service Collections, Costs, Personnel, and US Population, by Fiscal Year-IRS Data Book Table 29 for 2009.

12 Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, “Inefficient Redistribution,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 3 (September 2001): 649–661.

13 Quote attributed to Elizabeth Ohene, “Words, Deeds and Cocoa,” West Africa 31 (August 1982), 2104, cited in Jeffrey Herbst, The Politics of Reform in Ghana, 1982–1991 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 111.

14 S. E. Finer, The History of Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 663–727.

15 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, “Political Survival and Endogenous Institutional Change,” Comparative Political Studies 42, no. 2 (2009): 167–197. A. H. Gelb, Windfall Gains: Blessing or Curse ? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Michael Ross, “Political Economy of Resource Curse,” World Politics 51 (1999): 297–322; Jeffrey D. Sachs and Andrew M. Warner, “Natural Resource Abundance and Economic Growth,” Working Paper 5398, 1995.

16 Xavier Sala-i-Martin Arvind Subramanian, “Addressing the Natural Resource Curse: An Illustration from Nigeria,” Working Paper 9804, NBER Working Paper series (Cambridge MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2003). Available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w9804.

17 Data taken from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators 2010. Accessed at http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators. Amounts reported in constant 2000 US dollars.

Chapter 5: Getting and Spending

1 See Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George W. Downs, “The Rise of Sustainable Autocracy,” Foreign Affairs 84, no. 5 (September/October 2005): 77–86. For contrary views, see Robert J. Barro, Determinants of Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Empirical Study (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), and Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvares, José Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Material Well-Being in the World, 1950–1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).