How spreading democracy keeps dictators in power

Angry Planet

Matthew Gault

War, Politics, Conflict, Government, History, News

4.3 • 882 Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2017

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For his views on democracies and dictatorships, he’s been called a cynic. But NYU professor Alastair Smith doesn’t think that makes him wrong. This week on War College, Smith debunks popular ideas about dictators and how they stay in power. According to Smith, and his colleague Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, the West too often trades cash for policy favors from dictators. International criminal courts for authoritarian leaders are bad ideas, Smith argues, because they create negative incentives for dictators to leave. And attempts to help the masses - as former Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi attempted - can be a dictator’s biggest mistake. Smith says that for dictators, it’s good policy to understand who keeps them in power and to keep those entities – which can sometimes include the West - happy. By Matthew Gault Produced and edited by Bethel Habte

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Love this podcast.
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0:20.0	The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News. Contrary to most of the opinion that we have of Kedafi, his actual fatal mistake was he
0:26.6	actually tried to do something very stupid and that was he actually tried to improve the
0:31.0	welfare of the people. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict,
0:44.4	focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm your host Matthew Gauld. Today we're talking to New York University Professor of Politics, Alistair Smith.
1:05.0	So back in 2011, Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mosquita published a book titled The Dictators Handbook,
1:12.0	Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
1:16.0	The book is six years old, but it feels timeless and especially relevant today.
1:21.2	Alistair, thank you so much for joining us.
1:23.3	Happy to be here.
1:25.4	So in the West, we often watch dictators in other parts of the world and say to ourselves,
1:30.0	how is this guy still in power? So tell me why is bad behavior almost always good politics?
1:37.8	Well in the West we tend to think about politicians are being successful when they deliver effective public
1:43.9	policy, things that enrich society and make us well off. And that's because we're
1:48.7	very fortunate that we've grown up, or most of us have grown up in societies where political leaders are
1:55.0	responsible to millions of people and therefore they have to deliver to make
2:00.2	millions of people happy they have to deliver effective public policy and so those
2:04.3	are the policies we see and we see those policies as the ones are successful.
	...

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