Selectorate theory

All leaders, democratic or autocratic, want to stay in power, and none can rule alone. Selectorate theory, set out in The Logic of Political Survival (2003) by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph Siverson and James Morrow, explains political behaviour by the size of two groups:

• The selectorate (S): those who have a say, at least nominally, in choosing the leader, such as all voters in a democracy or the members of a ruling party.
• The winning coalition (W): the subset of the selectorate whose support is essential for the leader to keep power.

Leaders reward their coalition with a mix of private goods (money, jobs, contracts, privileges for supporters) and public goods (security, rule of law, infrastructure, education that benefit everyone). The theory's core claim is that the relative size of the winning coalition determines that mix.

Small and large coalitions

When W is small, it is cheaper to buy loyalty with private goods: a few generals, party officials and business allies can be paid handsomely. When W is large, private rewards spread too thinly, so leaders must deliver public goods to win support. Democracies, with large winning coalitions, therefore tend to provide more public goods; autocracies with small coalitions tend to reward cronies and tolerate corruption.

The loyalty norm

The ratio W/S measures how replaceable coalition members are. When W is small relative to a large S, as in rigged-election autocracies, each coalition member knows that if they defect and a challenger takes over, they may not be included in the new coalition. This loyalty norm makes small-coalition leaders unusually secure even when they perform badly.

Predictions

The authors derive and test many predictions: small-coalition leaders survive longer in office despite poor economic performance; large-coalition systems grow faster, have less corruption and provide more education and health; large-coalition leaders fight wars more carefully because defeat costs them their jobs, which helps explain the democratic peace; and foreign aid flows to small-coalition regimes that can deliver policy concessions in exchange for private benefits to leaders.

The Dictator's Handbook

In a popular version, The Dictator's Handbook (2011), Bueno de Mesquita and Smith apply the logic to companies, sports federations and charities as well as states, arguing that "bad behaviour" is often good politics for leaders who depend on a few key supporters.

• Personalist and military regimes: leaders such as Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire relied on a narrow circle rewarded with access to state revenues, while public infrastructure decayed.
• Resource-rich states: revenue from oil or minerals lets small-coalition leaders pay supporters without taxing citizens, reducing the need for public goods.
• Democratisation: expansions of the franchise and competitive elections increase W, and the theory predicts shifts towards public spending, as studied in nineteenth-century Europe and in post-1990 transitions.
• Organisations: the governance of international sports bodies, where a small number of national federations select the president, has been analysed with selectorate logic.
• DAOs and token governance: concentrated token holdings create small effective winning coalitions, which may favour insiders over broad public goods.

• Measurement: W and S are measured with indices built from regime-type data (such as Polity components), so they may simply proxy for democracy. Kevin Clarke and Randall Stone showed that the original estimation procedure effectively omitted democracy and that most key findings do not survive when democracy is controlled for.
• Autocratic variety: Mary Gallagher and Jonathan Hanson argued that the concepts of selectorate and winning coalition are hard to apply where formal succession institutions are absent or inconsequential, that measurement is flawed, and that the theory is a blunt instrument for understanding authoritarian rule.
• Empirical support: Ryan Kennedy's analysis found weaker empirical support for several of the theory's survival predictions than the authors reported.
• Single-motive actors: the model assumes leaders care only about survival and supporters only about rewards, neglecting ideology, identity and legitimacy.
• Public goods in autocracies: some small-coalition regimes, such as several East Asian developmental states, provided substantial public goods, which the theory struggles to explain without additional assumptions.

Selectorate theory offers a parsimonious, general account of why institutions shape the mix of public and private goods and why poorly performing autocrats can survive. Its intuitions about coalition size and the loyalty norm are widely used in comparative politics, international relations and the analysis of organisations. Its quantitative tests are contested, mainly because coalition size is hard to measure independently of democracy. For institution designers, the practical message is to widen the set of people whose support leaders need and to make coalition members harder to replace.

• Clarke and Stone, "Democracy and the Logic of Political Survival" (2008)
• Gallagher and Hanson, "Power Tool or Dull Blade? Selectorate Theory for Autocracies" (2015)
• Ryan Kennedy, "Survival and Accountability" (2009)
• Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson and Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (MIT Press, 2003)
• Bueno de Mesquita and Smith, The Dictator's Handbook (PublicAffairs, 2011)