The Logic of Political Survival

Making executive politics mutually productive and fair

“…As a general proposition, broadening one's coalition limits the office-seeker's ability to target spoils and divisive policies to its hardcore members. Spoils must be divided between more members (Bueno de Mesquita et al 2003). Policies must be made to accommodate members with more diverse beliefs and values (Buchanan and Tullock 1962).…”

“…office-holding by conquest, coup or birth), winner-take-all electoral conflict may be a ''good''-indeed a very good-result. 5 Moreover, especially insofar as there are large numbers of potentially pivotal voters (Wittman 1997;Bueno de Mesquita et al 2003), elite office-seekers can afford only marginal distortions that add bias to agendas founded upon plausible conceptions of the general interest. Taking the distortions too far can come at the price of having fewer tax revenues available for Fig.…”

“…1 Office-seekers use some or all of these strategies (or others like them), typically in combination. These strategies have large social costs, reckoned in terms of lives, wealth and welfare destroyed (Robinson 1998;Bueno de Mesquita et al 2003).…”

Do authoritarian institutions mobilize economic cooperation?

“…Highly dependent private sectors and geographically dispersed rural cultivators lacked the independence or organization to launch sustained protest against declining economic conditions' ' (1995: 36). The presence in these countries of exportable commodities rules out the necessity to solicit economic cooperation and rents are obtained from non-tax revenues and taxes on international trade and delivered to the members of the supporting coalition through extensive patronage networks (Gibson and Hoffman 2002;Bueno de Mesquita et al 2003;Moore 2008). Indeed, a simple look at the data on revenue composition of the World Development Indicators reveals that oilexporting authoritarian countries get on average 61.7% (18.4% of the GDP) of their revenues from non-taxed sources, while non-exporting authoritarian regimes get only 18.8% of their revenues (4.4% of the GDP) from this stream.…”

The problem of political calculation in autocracies

“…In their seminal work ''The logic of political survival'' Bueno de Mesquita et al (2003) present a general model of the relationship between the leader and his supporters. They use the term ''leader'' since their model applies to both autocratic and democratic regimes.…”