Last year I had the pleasure to read a wonderfully ambitious and enlightening scholarly work, called The Logic of Political Survival (Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson & Morrow, 2003). In the past 12 months, it has probably influenced my thinking more than any other article, book or report.

The book builds a formal model to explain how political survival depends on the maintenance of a winning coalition of allies, how political leaders allocate resources to public and private goods, how institutions for selecting leaders determine much of their political behavior, and why in many cases good policies are detrimental to political survival whereas bad policies can enhance political survival.

The Theory of the Logic of Political Survival

The comparative theory is "motivated by the notion that leaders want to keep their positions of power and privilege." (24)

A central thesis of the analysis is that countries are governed as they are, not because the leaders in some countries are inherently more greedy and dishonest than in other countries, or because people across countries differ in their willingness to accept dictatorship and opression, but because there is tremendous variation across countries in the institutions that enable and constrain the behavior of leaders. This explains why King Leupold was civilized at home in Belgium and at the same time an absolute tyrant in Africa!

From a book review,

"The model is based on the reality that every leader is kept in power by some group of sufficient size (the "winning coalition") to prevail over the rest of the "selectorate" in addition to the disenfranchised. The building blocks of the model include the leadership, winning coalition, and selectorate, plus the residents of the polity and any challenger to the leadership. Thus: Leaders, all of whom face challengers who wish to depose them, maintain their coalitions of supporters by taxing and spending in ways that allocate mixes of public and private goods. The nature of the mix depends on the size of the winning coalition, while the total amount spent depends both on the size of the selectorate and on the winning coalition (37)." (Starr, 2005, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 67, No. 2, pp. 607-609.)

The selectorate is that group of citizens that participate in the selection of political leaders. In a political system with universal adult suffrage, such as prevails in the USA and most democracies, the selectorate includes every male and female citizen of voting age. In monarchies, military juntas, and many autocracies, by contrast, the selectorate is comprised of only a small set of ruling elite.

In Beuna de Mesquita's own words,

"It is easy to identify the selectorate in democracies. All enfranchised citizens fall within it. It is less obvious in other political systems. A few examples may help clarify the concept. Following the death of England's King Richard I in April 1199, a new king had to be chosen from among three candidates (John Lackland, his nephew Arthur, and Eleanor of Aquitaine). The responsibility of appointing a new monarch fell to 197 barons and the pope. This tiny group -- and no one else --constituted the selectorate. In the former Soviet Union, the selectorate consisted of something close to the entire electorate. That is, just about any Soviet citizen had a chance (albeit a tiny one), to rise to political prominence. In short, the Soviet selectorate was very large. This was important, for it allowed the ruling elite to pick ready substitutes for any disloyal member of the winning coalition." (See full paper here.)

The winning coalition is the subset of the selectorate that holds the leader in office. Generally, the attitudes, concerns and preferences of political actors will mirror the subset of the selectorate that the actor believes to be the winning coalition.

According to Buena de Mesquita:

"The winning coalition, made up of a portion of the selectorate, has two distinct qualities. First, its support is essential for the incumbent to stay in office. If members of the winning coalition defect to a rival and new members cannot quickly be added to replace them, then the incumbent is deposed and the rival comes to power. Second, members of the winning coalition are accorded privileges unavailable to nonmembers. Specifically, members share in any of the private benefits that the leadership distributes. These benefits include opportunities for corruption, black marketeering, and so on.

In most democracies, the winning coalition consists of the set of voters whose support is essential to selecting and keeping a leader in office. In a plurality-voting system like the United States, for example, Bill Clinton’s 1992 winning coalition included about 43 percent of the electorate (or, perhaps, all of his supporters up to just beyond 38 percent, the share of the vote earned by George Bush). Though these people received few and small private benefits, we can still think of Clinton's legislative agenda as partially motivated to shift resources disproportionately to these constituents through taxation, welfare programs, and other redistributive policies. In an autocracy like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, by contrast, the winning coalition was tiny. Though Iraq had universal adult suffrage, keeping Hussein in power depends on the support of the Republican Guard and the Takriti Clan--that is, his close personal kinsmen, a small group indeed. In King Leopold's Congo during the latter third of the nineteenth century, the winning coalition was made up of the Force Publique, Leopold's small group of henchmen who maintained the extractive and exploitative regime that he put in place to steal the wealth of the Congo.

Maintaining the loyalty of the winning coalition is crucial for any political leader. How best to do so depends on the size of the selectorate and the size of the winning coalition. We demonstrate when loyalty is best achieved by giving coalition members special private privileges ("private goods" in the vocabulary of economics) and when it is best achieved by implementing public policies that raise the welfare of the whole society.

Before turning to the development of our theory, we pause to help clarify the distinction between nominal regime types (like democracy, autocracy, and monarchy) and our institutional variables (the size of the selectorate and the size of the winning coalition). Most large-coalition systems are democracies, just as most small-coalition, large-selectorate polities are autocracies. Systems with a small coalition and a small selectorate tend to be monarchies or military juntas." (See full paper here.)

The theory maintains that the logic of a politician's survival is to maintain the support of the winning coalition; that a politician upholds his position in office by providing members of the winning coalition with benefits and rewards that ensure their continued backing and support.

The central theme of the model is that "the size of the winning coalition determines whether policies have a public or private focus." (104) So if there is a small winning coalition (relative to the size of the society), the politician will be more likely to distribute private benefits to the privilidged few, but if the winning coalition is large (relative to the size of the society), then the cost of providing private benefits becomes excessively high, and politicians generate more support by offering public goods for coalition members (i.e. infrastructure including roads, water, electrictity, etc.).

In summary, the theory holds that across societies, variations in political institutions yield variations in the size and composition of both the selectorate and the winning coalition, which in turn yields variations in political behaviors as politicians seek to win and wield power.

Applying the Theory to Understand the Provision of Infrastructure

Now, lets apply the theory to analyze the provision of infrastructure across societies.

Building on the central theme of the model, if the winning coalition is relatively large relative to the overall population of the country, like in the US or UK, then the theory suggests that infrastructure is used to distribute public benefits to the average person in the street thru improved infrastructure coverage and access. This may explain why US politicians pave potholes just before election time, and why Arnold Schwarzeneggar was able to save his governorship with a massive infrastructure spending package, announced at the 11th hour as his base of support was falling away.

In contrast, if the winning coalition is a small group of elites, like in Indonesia under the Suharto regime, then the theory would suggest that infrastructure is used to distribute private benefits to the powerful group of ruling elites thru lucrative contracts, without consideration of the needs of the average person in the society. This explains, partly at least, why Suharto's government distributed infrastructure construction and operations contracts primarily within his web of political allies. Indeed, every one of the independent power plants constructed under the Suharto regime was co-owned by a Suharto family member, or by another member of the ruling elite (see Louis T. Wells, 2006).

Thus, we observe that leaders in small-coalition polities -- autocracies, monarchies and military juntas -- expend tax revenues on infrastructure as an instrument to redistribute wealth and power to the elites that make up the winning coalition, and they have no-concern over allegations of corruption from the general public, because it is not the general public that holds them in power. Meanwhile, in large-coalition systems, politicians use infrastructure to distribute public benefits to the average citizen thru improved coverage and access, and of course in these systems leaders are very sensitive to allegations of corruption.

For any firm working in the global marketplace, this is surely an interesting insight! Politicians in large-coalition systems will be very fearful of cronyism and corruption because if found out they can lose their base of support, wheras politicians in small-coalition systems must necessarily engage in corrupt and cronyistic behavior, for this is the very basis of their survival!!!

Final Note: As Wolfowitz goes around the world trumpeting anti-corruption, he would be well-advised to consider that corruption is not a characteristic of the leaders, it is endemic to the political institutions within these societies, which in turn arise out of layers of interlocking norms and customs, which themselves sit upon a substrate of deep-seated beliefs and values (see Scott, 2002; North, 1990). Thus, corruption is not a problem that can be solved with a simple anti-corruption campaign! But rather it is a byproduct of a set of institutional arrangements that are deeply entrenched and highly resistant to change.

Posted by rjorr at November 25, 2006 8:58 PM