Alastair Smith Books
Alastair Smith is a political economist specializing in political survival and leadership strategies.
Known for: The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics, The Logic of Political Survival
Books by Alastair Smith
The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics
This book explores the logic of political survival, arguing that leaders—whether dictators or democrats—act primarily to maintain power rather than to serve the public good. Using a rational-choice fr...
The Logic of Political Survival
This book presents a unified theory of political survival, explaining how leaders maintain power by distributing resources and rewards to key supporters. The authors develop a formal model of politica...
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The Logic of Political Survival and the Selectorate Theory
The key to understanding political stability lies not in ideology or morality, but in mathematics—the arithmetic of loyalty. Every regime operates through a stratified population divided into distinct groups that we call the selectorate, the real selectorate, and the winning coalition. The selector...
From The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics
Power, Loyalty, and Resource Allocation
If you want to know what keeps leaders secure, look not at constitutions or speeches—look at money. Resources are the lifeblood of loyalty. In the political survival game, leaders use resources—material, institutional, or symbolic—to keep their coalition close and dependent. In small-coalition syst...
From The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics
The Selectorate Theory
At the core of our analysis lies a simple but powerful triad: the selectorate, the winning coalition, and the interchangeables. The selectorate represents all those individuals with a formal say in choosing the leader—it might include the voting public in a democracy or a small circle of elites in a...
From The Logic of Political Survival
Institutional Variation
Different political institutions structure the size and composition of the selectorate and winning coalition. Democracies have expansive electorates—large selectorates—and thus require large coalitions to remain in power. Monarchies and autocracies, by contrast, often limit participation to a very s...
From The Logic of Political Survival
About Alastair Smith
Alastair Smith is a political economist specializing in political survival and leadership strategies.
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Alastair Smith is a political economist specializing in political survival and leadership strategies.
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