The Logic of Political Survival.

• Author: Holcombe, Randall G.
• Position: Book Review

The Logic of Political Survival

By Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. xiii, 536. $40.00 cloth.

Because leaders' political survival depends on their followers' support, we might expect that leaders who are more successful in bringing peace and prosperity to their nations will remain in power longer, yet the opposite appears to be true. Democratic governments appear to offer their citizens more peace and prosperity than autocracies do, but autocratic leaders stay in office roughly twice as long as leaders in democratic nations. One of the conclusions of The Logic of Political Survival is that in many cases good policies are detrimental to political survival, whereas bad policies often enhance political survival.

Political survival depends on the maintenance of a winning coalition of supporters. Coalition members come from a group called the selectorate, which consists of those individuals who might find themselves in the winning coalition. In a democracy, the winning coalition is large relative to the size of the selectorate, which increases the probability that a member of the current leader's coalition will be included in a challenger's coalition and continue to receive the benefits of a coalition member. This situation creates weak bonds between leaders and their coalition members. In autocracies, winning coalitions are small, so members of the current leader's coalition are less likely to end up in a challenger's coalition; this situation generates stronger loyalty and support among coalition members for their political leaders.

Small coalitions have fewer members among whom the benefits of office holding must be divided, which gives larger gains to each member and in turn reinforces the coalition members' loyalty, whereas larger coalitions dilute the gains from coalition membership. Furthermore, small winning coalitions can be given benefits in the form of private goods for themselves, but if winning coalitions are large, the cost of providing private benefits becomes unaffordably high, and leaders generate more support by providing public goods for coalition members. Therefore, small coalitions tend to provide private goods for their members, generating corruption and inefficiency, but the larger the winning coalition, the better it is for the leader's survival to produce public goods, which as a result pushes leaders with larger coalitions to produce...