The 'selectorate' is the set of people who have a meaningful say in choosing leaders, and it varies greatly in size — the electorate in a democracy, the generals and senior civil servants in a military junta, or roughly 300-400 essential people in North Korea.

The 'winning coalition' is the subset of the selectorate whose support is essential to keep a leader in office, in exchange for which they receive benefits — corruption opportunities, rent-seeking, and bribes.

The larger the winning coalition, the more efficient it is for leaders to rule by producing public goods rather than private rewards, because there are too many cronies to bribe individually — coalition size acts as the implicit price of private goods, which de Tocqueville observed.

When the selectorate is very large relative to the winning coalition, the incumbent need not spend as much to keep supporters loyal, because a defector has a low probability of being essential to a rival — leaving more discretion for the leader to keep resources for himself or pursue clever or dumb policies.

The implicit tax rate is higher when the coalition is small: in North Korea, with per-capita income around $600, the average tax rate is about 10%, whereas in the US a person with comparable income pays nothing — so the comparable-income person in North Korea pays a much higher rate to feed the leadership's rent-seeking demands.

Foreign aid has the same effect as the natural-resource curse because, like oil in the ground, it is money the leader can tap without raising taxes on labor — a 'free good' that sustains bad leaders in office and oppresses the public.

Foreign aid is given in exchange for policy concessions that benefit the donor government's democratic constituents, not the recipient's citizens — because if the recipient would follow those policies anyway, there'd be no need to pay them — making aid harmful to recipient citizens while helping autocrats supplement bribes.

Foreign aid not only discourages leaders from reforms but makes it easier for them to purge rivals and tighten their grip — when facing a credible threat, the rational response is to shrink the coalition and cut public goods rather than democratize.

Democracies cut aid to elected governments whose policies they dislike (e.g., Hamas in the Palestinian Authority) because voters prefer cutting money to inducing better policies over funding abhorrent ones — making it anti-democratic for a re-election-seeking leader to fund foreign agendas their constituents reject.

The World Bank is itself a small-coalition political entity whose loan decisions are made by representatives of guaranteed-risk banks and recipient-country governments who profit from continued flows — so it does what is incentive-compatible for its constituents rather than advancing welfare, and exists fundamentally to make loans.

Aid programs have actually been successful, not failures — but what they succeed at is keeping recipient policies aligned with donor desires and keeping autocrats in power, not the publicly stated goals like reducing poverty.

A core analytical lesson of this worldview is to distinguish between what people say and what they do — assuming what people do reflects what they want, while what they say may just be what they think you'd like to hear.

Democratic leaders are highly selective about wars, choosing fights they believe they will almost certainly win, because losing a war nearly guarantees they are deposed — and when a war goes badly they increase effort (double up) because winning is the public good that matters.

Autocrats can be more adventurous in war because they are judged on delivering goodies to cronies, not policy performance — so they fight in a broader range of circumstances, are less likely to add resources when losing if it would cost their cronies, and survive defeat as long as they keep paying cronies and aren't removed by a victorious foreign rival.

Hitler did not fully mobilize the German steel industry early in WWII (unlike WWI) because he feared losing the loyalty of comfortable middle-class supporters if he stopped producing consumer goods — driving his need for slave labor and the Ukraine — and only cranked up the war effort late when defeat clearly meant being deposed, while the Allies mobilized fully from day one.

Dictators are never truly able to do whatever they want; even Hitler had to curry favor with a group of relatively comfortable middle-class supporters he viewed as necessary, contradicting the cartoon image of an all-powerful dictator able to wage total war freely.

Once a free press and free assembly are installed, they are hard to reverse without mass slaughter, which requires soldiers willing to fire on mass movements — and they often are not, as seen in the 1991 Soviet coup and the Velvet Revolutions, especially Poland.

Autocrats start wars for two reasons: they have policy beliefs (sometimes that conquering neighbors will expand the extractable resource base via land grabs or tribute), and because their rent-seeking inefficient economies run down over time, creating a shortage of resources to bribe cronies — exemplified by Saddam Hussein's 1991 move on Kuwait's oil fields.

Cronies are relatively eager to push for war because they expect to expand their booty and their heads are less likely to roll than the leader's, so they pressure the leader toward war more often than the leader might prefer — and the leader must respond to keep them loyal.

Ahmadinejad's nuclear weapons program is a skillful political strategy: it resonates with young professionals' pride amid a declining economy, restores Iran's primacy as the exporter of Shia fundamentalism against the rising al-Qaeda, creates bargaining leverage, and secures his hold on power — not the act of a madman.

Chavez and Putin understand that elections do not equal democracy: you can hold elections without risk if you control the media and the ability to assemble — Chavez took control of Venezuela's mass media to ensure opponents get zero or negative publicity, financed by oil wealth that lets him fund populism without taxing labor.

Leaders facing domestic problems find it advantageous to blame outsiders, typically the United States, because casting blame elsewhere diverts attention from internal government failures — Chavez and Ahmadinejad use this to explain economic misery they would not want attributed to their own governance.

Iran's nuclear program is not a high-risk gamble because Ahmadinejad does not believe the US poses a credible force threat — the US military is stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan, a strike would provoke hard-to-contain retaliation, and his statements are costless 'cheap talk' in game-theory terms, with North Korea serving as a model of building a device without being struck.

Autocrats have learned to use market economies and the growth markets foster as a mechanism to sustain themselves in power rather than to put themselves at risk — so market reform and democratization are sharply distinct, and a more market-oriented world is not necessarily a more democratic or peaceful one.

Genuine democracy requires three things beyond vote-counting: freedom of assembly, a free press, and ballots counted by a nonpartisan neutral mechanism — and a very large percentage of countries said to have moved toward democracy lack at least one of these, with international observers mistakenly certifying only the accuracy of counting while ignoring the information and assembly stages.

Putin allows fair vote-counting and multiple parties precisely because he is confident that controlling the media (manipulation of information) is sufficient to ensure his electoral victory — making fair counting unnecessary to suppress.

China began economic reform in 1979 because the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution had devastated the economy and the resource flow sustaining the Communist Party's power, so the Party brought Deng Xiaoping back from exile and adopted his previously discredited market ideas to revitalize their hold on power — not to democratize.

China's economic growth postponed pressures for democratization rather than hastening them — refuting the Lipset-style argument that a rising middle class would demand political voice — as 28 years on the Communist Party remains the sole arbiter of policy with continued elite privilege and rampant corruption.

China faces a coming challenge as rising coastal labor costs push low-end manufacturing elsewhere, forcing a shift to higher-technology production requiring more educated, better-informed workers — which the regime counters by keeping education technology-oriented rather than liberal-arts and aggressively controlling search engines and internet information flow.

China would likely repeat a Tiananmen-style crackdown today because they learned that 'nothing happened' — foreign investors care about the predictability of governance, not its nature, so the economic consequences of repression were brief and quickly disappeared.

The median Chinese person does not have meaningfully more information access despite economic growth — gains accrue disproportionately to the urban wealthy, while most Chinese remain poor in remote areas; the real question is whether the growing information threat from urban centers exceeds the regime's ability to offset it through expanded corruption opportunities.

Multinational oil firms (e.g., BP in Nigeria) deliberately bring in foreign workers rather than training locals because they are interested only in extracting wealth and going home, not changing the government — so the presence of foreign business is not a pressure for democratization, since local know-how could be used for political purposes.

There is an underappreciated window of opportunity in dictatorial transitions: new dictators have a very high overthrow risk in their first two years because they haven't established competence in thievery and crony payoffs, so they actually have a better chance of surviving those years as a democrat — meaning aid conditioned on installing free press and free assembly during transitions could lock in durable democracy.

Cuba is entering a transition period where Fidel is attempting a dynastic passage to Raul (himself in his late 70s), creating a real window of opportunity for non-US governments to lay foundations for an orderly peaceful transition to democracy that benefits Cuba's leaders as well as outside promoters.

Genuine democracies tend to adopt policies that lead to prosperity, so locking in democracy in transition periods would also reduce the need for ongoing foreign aid and lower the prospect of war.

Japanese media obtain their information only from government ministries and are therefore not truly free, because they would lose access to government information if they reported independently.

Dictators must maintain a certain level of public economic productivity because if they extract too much, workers consume leisure instead of working and have no incentive to produce, leaving no replacement money to keep the coalition loyal — a delicate balance every leader must follow.

We all know about the electorate, the people who vote in a democracy.