The Dictator’s Handbook

The Dictator’s Handbook

Review by Samuel Brittan

An illuminating and reader-friendly look at dictatorships and imperfect democracies

Niccolo Machiavelli, a 16th-century Florentine statesman who turned to writing during a long period out of office, became notorious for his book, The Prince. Instead of issuing pious platitudes, he analysed the actual behaviour of successful rulers. Inevitably traduced as an immoralist, he was mainly concerned to show what in Tony Blair speak may be described as “what works”, as distinct from what ought to happen. For example, it is more important for a prince to be feared than loved, although he should if possible avoid hatred. His call in another book for the unification of Italy was hardly the work of a hard-boiled cynic.


The institutional structure today is superficially so far removed from 16th-century Florence that a reader may reasonably request some help in applying Machiavelli’s insights to modern conditions. But Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, authors of The Dictator’s Handbook, claim to do more than that. They also claim to improve on Machiavelli’s teachings. To adjudicate on whether they do or not would require a long and tedious comparative analysis of texts. Better to plunge straight into the modern work.
This is presented as a reader-friendly distillation of many years of research. Its basic insight is that to stay in power, a ruler has to distinguish between the nominal selectorate, the real selectorate and the winning coalition. The authors, somewhat confusingly, change their terminology from time to time. On the page after these groups are introduced they are renamed interchangeables, influentials and essentials. I am tempted to say that in the pre-Blair Labour party, the nominal selectorate was the party membership, the real selectorate the college of those who elected the leader, and the winning coalition the trade union leaders who counted for most. Maybe matters are different today, but events leading to the anointment of Ed Miliband as Labour leader makes one wonder.
The authors claim that this typology applies to all human groups including business corporations. It is clear that the ordinary shareholders are the interchangeables, the board of directors are – normally but not always – the essentials. But who exactly are the influentials? We have here an amusing game to play in the forthcoming Christmas holidays. But have we anything more?
The authors give the game away when towards the end of the book, they give their recommendations for improving matters. They believe that governments are most likely to be forces for good if they come to power via a winning coalition of the largest possible electorate – although they try to maintain their realist stance by discussing at length processes such as gerrymandering and the manipulation of constituency boundaries. I am reminded of an essay by the Scottish utilitarian James Mill in which he advocated universal suffrage as an automatic way of aligning the interests of the ruler with those of the population. This essay was denounced by the historian Lord Macaulay as mechanistic and pseudo-scientific.
It is no accident that The Dictator’s Handbook is most illuminating in the cases of dictatorships in the developing world or highly imperfect democracies such as Russia or Iran. The title suggests that the authors half recognise this. One of their more successful examples is that “cuts in US aid to Egypt, combined with a serious recession that produced high unemployment, meant that [Hosni] Mubarak’s coalition was likely to be underpaid and the people were likely to believe that the risks and costs of rebellion were smaller than usual”. They trace the end of apartheid to a decline in the South African national income which meant that the white regime did not have sufficient resources to buy the continued loyalty required to keep the people suppressed.
An interesting finding is that dictatorships in the developing world often have good records in primary education, necessary to secure an able workforce, but few top universities, which might sow dissent. One of the best chapters explains how official foreign aid usually serves only to buttress the local oligarchs.
I have one methodological gripe. There is now a longstanding economic analysis of politics known as public choice in which outcomes are assessed in terms of the material self-interest of political actors rather than their professed ideologies. This may be just as contentious as other branches of economics, but at least it should be mentioned. Nor is there any attempt to examine what empirical psychology has to say about motives and behaviour. The three disciplines of economics, psychology and “pol­itical science” are not so outstandingly successful that they can remain in ivory towers disdainful of each other.