The Logic of Political Survival

“…goods to top party o ffi cials and other elites (patronage), but also on the delivery of (often local) public goods to larger segments of the population (clientelism) aimed at mobilizing mass support (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003; Magaloni and Kricheli 2010; Malesky, Abrami and Zheng 2011).”

“But this is expensive when leaders try to cater to different constituencies, as will often be the case in countries led by strong parties, inducing politicians to instead prioritize public goods spending. see Bueno de mesquita et al. 2003.”

“The logic for greater responsiveness to loyal insiders relates to the need for authoritarian leaders to maintain a stable winning coalition (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2004; Haber 2006).”

“An autocrat faces a number of threats, such as elite schisms, betrayal, or public unrest (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003; Egorov and Sonin 2011; Svolik 2012); dealing with these threats takes effort on behalf of his lieutenants.”

“…can target external opposition actors and potential threats within the regime.18 Elections can be used to co-opt threats directly, by offering well-performing opposition groups and individuals spoils through legislature seats,19 or indirectly, 15 Wintrobe 1998; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003.”

“When loyalty is high (winning coalition small), leaders may safely reserve more of the state budget for personal use “if they find themselves at risk of being deposed” (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005, 93).”

“…is that dictatorial regimes’ propensity to select ‘bad policies’ in order to enhance personal consumption or political survival (e.g. Robinson, 1998; Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2003; Acemoglu & Robinson, 2006a; Miquel, 2007) is aggravated in contexts of weak stateinstitutional structures.”

“31 Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003.”

“In this vein, Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) have argued that authoritarian states rely not on an ‘electorate’, but on a ‘selectorate’ for their survival.”

“We also rely on data from Banks’ Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive (Banks 1979) (drawn from the dataset made available by Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003)) to measure riots, strikes, revolutions, demonstrations, and other anti-government activities.”

“I also control for an objective measure of political development: the winning coalition size in a survey respondent’s country during the year prior to their survey response being collected (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2003).(6) Although scholars have produced conflicting evidence regarding the relationship between econo…”

“As a result, strongly authoritarian systems are remarkably stable; their leaders often remain in power considerably longer than do democratically elected leaders (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 1999, 2003), even if autocracy as a system may be less durable than democracy.”

“…control of a high fraction of society’s resources encourages them to pay off members of their relatively small support coalition by allowing them to pillage the ecosystem, as there is less political advantage in providing public goods such as environmental quality (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003).”

“…for the observed patterns might be that, first, a 25 new leader must convince his supporters at the outset of his tenure that he will remain loyal to them by excluding other powerful elites in order to strengthen the loyalty norm (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2003; Albertus & Menaldo, 2012).”

“See Smith (1996); Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003); Clark (2003).”

“Cf. Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003 and McGillivray and Smith 2008.”

“…range of international political phenomena, including trade liberalization (Mansfield et al. 2000; Kono 2006), public-goods provision (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003; Bättig and Bernauer 2009), human rights protection (Moravcsik 2000; Simmons and Danner 2010), democracy promotion (Pevehouse…”

“For example, a long-standing and ongoing debate in comparative politics surrounds the classification of political systems ( Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003; Vanhanen 2003; Marshall, Jaggers, and Gurr 2004; Treier and Jackman 2008; Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton 2010).”

“…between policy choice and policy implementation has long been criticized in public administration (Fesler and Kettl 1991), and even within dictatorships numerous studies demonstrate that actual authority and decision power is dispersed across multiple actors (Bueno de Mesquita et al 2003).”

“…to act in the public interest rather than in their own private interest (Barro 1973; Ferejohn 1986), there are also strong incentives for majority tyranny—for the official to exploit a minority of the group for the benefit of a minimum winning coalition (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003; Riker 1962).”

“On average, this should lead to greater support for government policies.21 As Bueno de Mesquita et al. (1999, 2003) argue, states with democratic institutions should produce policies that are beneficial to a larger number of citizens.”

“160 For example, see Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003.”

“As the economic fortunes of the state are likely tied to the selectorate’s evaluation of the leader’s performance ( Bueno de Mesquita, et al, 2003 ), his or her fate may be dependent on how the challenge of sanctions is met.”

“2003 ), and neither seeks the overall welfare of the population or state.”

“This follows the general logic of Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003), in that regimes with smaller “winning coalitions” (i.e., fewer critical supporters) prefer funneling resources to these select supporters—leaving them with larger individual rewards and greater potential income loss if the regime…”

“Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) aver that an insider’s loyalty is inversely related to the size of the group of regime insiders; therefore, a dictator’s best strategy is to curtail the size of the ‘‘winning coalition’’ by buying off supporters with targeted private goods.”

“…one’s loyalty behind a challenging faction is very high, taking into account the loss of ample personal privilege in case of failure (Geddes, 1999a) and the low possibility of being included in future ruling coalitions given the large pool of eligible candidates (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2003).”

“It is often noted that high government spending does not necessarily mean more efficient allocation of public goods, such as health and education, but it may lead to greater rents to powerful constituents (c.f. Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2002, 2003; Azam, 2001).”

“Politicians, assumed to be office-seeking and interested in retaining power (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005), take into account citizens’ concerns about political issues, which in turn shapes how the government responds with legislative action (e.g., Anderson et al. 2017).”

“These works examine how the dictator chooses the size and characteristics of his inner circle, and how these variables in turn determine the dictator’s policy choices and survival odds (Egorov and Sonin 2011, Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003).”

“One assumption many political scientists take as given is the “logic of political survival,” in which the analyst assumes that all political leaders want first and foremost to remain in power [97].”

“For relevant work, see Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003), De Mesquita and Smith (2010), Moore (2000), Rasler (1996), Ritter (2014), and Shellman (2006).”

“Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003; Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland 2009; Geddes 1999; Lindberg et al. 2014. space, underscore that new and better measures of political institutions are not enough to assess democratic or autocratic distinctiveness on a given IR dependent variable.”

“In addition to the standard analysis we therefore perform the following simple three-step test: 1) we first follow Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) in calculating the residuals of regressing the eight indicators on (log) GDP per capita, thereby taking out most joint variation due to economic…”

“Alternatively, where politicians have very narrow constituencies, they tend to pursue goods and services that can be targeted to smaller groups (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2004; Cox and McCubbins 2001; Franzese, Nooruddin, and Long-Jusko 2004; Lake and Baum 2001; Olson 2000; Stasavage 2005).”

“…the behavior of democracies underscores what is obvious to anyone familiar with the history of 19th century imperialism: having a democratic regime does not rule out such aggressive policy choices (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 1999:801; Reiter and Stam, 2002:144– 163; Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2003).”

“Money is a private good and is distributed only to members of the government’s winning coalition (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003).”

“For 1E.g., Persson and Tabellini (2000), Besley and Persson (2011), Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) and Acemoglu, Robinson and Verdier (2004).”