‘The Logic of Political Survival,’ by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson & James D. Morrow
Since the COVID-19 pandemic and the political upheavals that followed, concerns have grown that many Western democracies face authoritarian pressure and are becoming less democratic. This shift has renewed interest in one of political science’s most influential frameworks for understanding democratic and nondemocratic rule: Selectorate Theory, developed by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow in “The Logic of Political Survival” (2003).
The theory fits within the law & economics tradition because it offers an economic account of political behavior. It focuses on the incentives facing every leader and treats public law as endogenous to those incentives—that is, as the product of survival strategies operating within a given institutional framework.
Bueno de Mesquita et al.’s formal model has broad implications for public finance, yet they do not develop those implications into a positive fiscal theory, meaning a theory that explains how fiscal policy works rather than how it should work. This piece takes up that task, analyzing tax and spending laws as survival mechanisms that determine who is taxed and who receives benefits to keep the leader in power.