Useful books to Help You Understand The Political Difference Between Democracies And Autocracies

by Bann Seng Tan
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5 books
Democracies seem to be on the decline and challenged by ascendant autocracies. In such turbulent times, it helps to understand what is at stake when we replace democracy with autocracy. When I teach my students comparative politics, a subfield in Political Science, I like to use regime type (democracy and autocracy) as an organizing theme. To help us see the impact of regime type, it is useful to take a set of policy domains, say peace and prosperity, and examine how that changes between regime types (comparing democracies with autocracies) or within regime types (comparing within democracies or within autocracies). Technically, this way of systemic comparison -where only the institutional setup varies- is called comparative statics. The following books do comparative statics well.
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The Logic of Political Survival

Bruce Bueno De Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, James D. Morrow, 2005
Conventional wisdom on politics assumes the leadership of a country is acting on behalf of their country’s interests. For instance, President Putin is assumed to be working on behalf of Russia’s national interests. That is, the agent is assumed to be acting on behalf of the principal they represent. Bueno de Mesquita’s (et al.) book challenges this notion by arguing that the agent’s primary motivation is political survival. Where the interests of the leader and the principal align, the leader may select policies that promote the interests of the principal. This is why democratic leaders tend to promote public welfare. Where the interests of the leader and the principal diverge, the leader tends towards policies that actively hurt the interests of the principal. This is why autocratic leaders tend to tolerate corruption, nepotism, and cronyism, or policies that actively hurt the interest of the principal. Bueno de Mesquita (et al.) called their account, the selectorate theory. It is a remarkable theory that can explain the policy proclivities of leaders across regime types.

The Dictator's Handbook

Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, 2011
Why are democratic leaders who provide good policies punished? Conversely, why are autocratic leaders who implement bad policies rewarded? Bueno de Mesquita and Smith (2011) use the selectorate theory to explain such political puzzles. Unlike their academic work (Bueno de Mesquita et al, 2003) which is heavy on statistics and game theory, this book is meant for the mass public. As such, the book relies on pithy summaries and interesting examples from the real world to make their point. My students, in my classes where the book is assigned, love the book because they can relate to the examples used. I suspect, this book appeals to the secret dictator in all of us. Who doesn’t want to want to run their own banana republic? This book shows you how to do it efficiently!

Principles of Comparative Politics

William Roberts Clark, Matt Golder, Sona Nadenichek Golder, 2017
Teaching introduction to comparative politics, a subfield in political science can be a dry affair. A way for organizing such courses is to do a series of country case studies from different regions. This can be an issue as students naturally care more about their home country and neighbouring countries instead of the politics of far-flung places. Clark, Golder, and Golder’s textbook takes the alternative approach of organizing by research themes. They also tend to rely on insights generated by game theory. Their discussion of the importance of the exit option in Exit Voice and Loyalty games, the structural and agent-based models of democratization, and games of imperfect information are well done. The result is a book that is more theoretical, and a viable alternative to the case study approach.

Information, Democracy and Autocracy

Economic Transparency and Political (In)Stability
James R. Hollyer, B. Peter Rosendorff, James Raymond Vreeland, 2018
Information is not free. It has political implications. Sensitive data, on say the wealth and income of the families of political leaders may be public information in democracies but missing in autocracies. For example, during the height of the Covid pandemic, countries, typically autocracies, who mismanaged their pandemic response also fudged their Covid casualty reports. All other things being equal, democracies tend to have more transparency of information than autocracies. Hollyer, Rosenberg, and Vreeland’s key insight is that information is not merely missing in autocracy but systemically absent. Their book explains the political consequences of missing information in autocracies and identifies empirical methods to account for it.

Dictatorship and Information

Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China
Martin K. Dimitrov, 2023
In democracies, people are free to speak the truth. In autocracies, people are punished for speaking the truth. Due to state repression, people in autocracies learn quickly to falsify their preferences. Such preference falsification makes it difficult for the dictator to know the true extent of his political support. To find out the truth, the dictator could lighten the repression and risk losing control of subsequent reforms. Alternatively, the dictator could double down on further repression, entrench preference falsification, and risk a lack of support in a future crisis. The choice between two bad alternatives is known as the dictator’s dilemma. Dimitro’s book challenges this conventional view of the dictator’s dilemma. He demonstrates the innovative ways by which autocracies seek data on public opinion. Focusing on authoritarian regimes, notably in Bulgaria and China, he reveals the existence of institutions such as new publications that provides cater only to the elite (as opposed to the public). Autocracies can innovate too!