Leaders survive by rewarding the coalition that keeps them in power, which determines how much public good they supply.
Bueno de Mesquita's framework. Small winning coalitions get private goods and produce kleptocracy; large ones require public goods, which is why franchise size predicts governance quality.
In practice
- A ruler who needs two hundred people to stay in power buys them houses; one who needs eleven million builds roads.
- A firm whose chief executive is retained by three institutional holders behaves differently from one answerable to forty thousand small ones.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works