The Dictator's Handbook

“A lucidly written, shrewdly argued meditation on how democrats and dictators preserve political authority.” — Wall Street Journal   Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith’s canonical book on political science turns conventional wisdom on its head. They start from a single proposition: leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don’t care about the “national interest”—or even their subjects—unless they must. As Bueno de Mesquita and Smith show, democracy is essentially just a conveni