Power Politics- Another Game

      This article is all about what you must do as a leader to hold onto power, seen more so from the view of a dictator and how democrats fall into similar traits. Bueno de Mesquita highlights a few key points that he believes makes politics what they are.
    Dependency is his first issue. He states that having to rely on others to keep you in power is a downfall, which completely contradicts the meaning of a democracy; for the people, by the people. The second, related issue, is that as a leader, you want a pool of people to call on to support you. It is easier to chose weak people to support you because without you, they have nothing. With that being said, places were leaders are using their people for personal gain, typically don't have fairly run elections, like in the case of Russia, everyone knew Putin was going to win, so why bother? Well you bother because this "inner circle  of support is almost like a ploy, you need this circle to know that they can be replaced.  Politics have always reminded me of high school,  a bunch of power hungry kids doing whatever they can to get their way.

     So, once you've obtained this inner circle, you need to tax the crap out of these people in order to get yourself some cash, and give yourself some room for bribery. With high taxes come two constraints; if the people don't work, there is not money for the leader, and if you tax them too high they'll eventually get to the point of desperation and revolt because they have nothing to lose. So, with that being said, push them just far enough that they can keep working, but not too far so you don't have a disastrous revolution on your hands.

     Keeping your cronies loyal to you is a big deal, you obviously don't want them supporting anyone else, so you use, you guessed it, money to "buy their love", at quite a cheap price at that. You want to give out as little money as possible to make the people happy in order to keep your own wallet stuffed. There is also the subject of reward, how do you reward your coalition? A public good, something that everyone can benefit from. The alternative however, is private rewards that only help those of which that keep your regime going. Now, democrats by nature, have to rely on huge groups of constituents for support and privately bribing all of them would cost far more then a public good, making a park for underprivileged kids or something lovely. The smaller you keep you inner circle, the less you need to spend on private goods. Every leader used public and private goods and it works in a balancing act. The bigger the coalition, the less private goods and more public goods. The smaller the coalition the less public goods, and more private goods.

     The general theme for power politics is that most democratic rules have to please the people, whereas a dictatorship only needs to minimally please a few of them with as little resources as they can use, and if the people aren't pleased, well, replace them with new people who "need" you.