Kyle Harrison
to-read
The Dictator's Handbook
The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics
- Author
- Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith
- Published
- 2011
- Pages
- 352
- Recommended
- Once
Why it’s on the list: Selectorate theory for a general reader: leaders behave badly because the coalition that keeps them in power is small, and everything follows from the size of that coalition.
Where I heard about it
- Barnes & Noble Huntington Beach (@bnhuntingtonbeach) — shown on the power-empire-and-guns shelf in a BookTok video billed as “our personal syllabus for this semester as we say goodbye to tiktok.”
Connections
- Democracy — the contrast case.
- Authoritarianism — what the incentives produce.