Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Reagan, Yeltsin, and the Strategy of Political Campaigning

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2007

⏱️ 67 minutes

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Summary

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, NYU and the Hoover Institute, talks about the political economy of political campaigns and his forthcoming book, The Strategy of Campaigning: Lessons from Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin. He talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the different strategies politicians pursue in attracting support from voters and party delegates, the persistence of negative campaigning, the cost to politicians of sticking to their principles and how the political choices of Reagan and Yeltsin intersected to end the Cold War and dissolve the Soviet Union.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:12.5	I'm your host Russ Roberts of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover
0:17.3	Institution.
0:18.7	Our website is econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast,
0:25.8	and find links to other information related to today's conversation.
0:29.9	Our email address is mailadicontalk.org.
0:33.6	We'd love to hear from you.
0:37.7	My guest today is Bruce Poin at a Mosquita, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and
0:41.8	the Silver Professor of Politics at New York University.
0:45.0	This is Bruce's third appearance in Econ Talk.
0:47.9	We've talked about his book, The Logic of Political Survival, and today we'll talk about
0:51.7	his forthcoming book, The Strategy of Campaigning, Lessons from Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin,
0:57.4	co-authored with Kyron Skinner, Sergei Cudelia, and Condoleezer Rice.
1:01.4	Bruce, there are a number of fascinating themes in the book.
1:05.0	Why some politicians can return from the political wilderness, while others cannot.
1:09.4	The evolution of how parties select their candidates, the strategy of campaigning, and the particular
1:14.3	strengths and weaknesses of Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin, as campaigners and political
1:18.8	strategists.
1:19.8	Let's start with the issue of political campaigning.
1:21.8	What's the theory of campaigning that you present in the book?
1:24.4	Well, the nugget in terms of what the theory is, there are two basic kinds of campaigners.
1:31.5	There are campaigners who engage in rhetoric that is they try to persuade voters, and what
	...

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