Selectorate theory
The theory has been applied to a large range of topics including foreign aid, the choice of tax rates by incumbent political leaders, as well as medieval European history.
The nominal selectorate, also referred to as the interchangeables, includes every person who has some say in choosing the leader (for example, in an American presidential election, this is all registered voters).
The real selectorate, also referred to as the influentials, are those who really choose the leaders (for example, in an American presidential election, the people who cast a vote for one of the candidates).
The winning coalition, also referred to as the essentials, are those whose support translates into victory (for example, in an American presidential election, those voters that get a candidate to 270 Electoral College votes).
In other countries, leaders may stay in power with the support of much smaller numbers of people, such as senior figures in the security forces, and business oligarchs, in contemporary Russia.
[1] The fundamental premise in selectorate theory is that the primary goal of a leader - regardless of secondary policy concerns[2] - is to remain in power.
[3]: 11 In The Dictator's Handbook, Bueno de Mesquita and Smith state five rules that leaders should use to stay in power:[3]: 17–18 In the selectorate theory, incumbents retain the loyalty of their winning coalition provided they can outcompete any challenger.
Incumbents induce this loyalty by offering the members of their winning coalition a mix of public and private goods.
[4] A leader's loyalty norm is the ratio of W/S and measures the chance any member of the selectorate has of being in the winning coalition of the next regime.
For countries with large winning coalitions, meaning democracies, leaders spend more on public goods such as infrastructure, education, and regulatory agencies while in countries with small winning coalitions, meaning dictatorships, leaders spend more on private goods such as money transfers and luxury items.
Calculating the amount of revenue the leader needs to spend to keep any member of the winning coalition loyal is done with the following formula:
A monarchy, where the selectorate is small and the winning coalition is even smaller, provides a challenger with a greater opportunity to overthrow the current leader.
The incentive for defection to attain a greater amount of goods offered by a challenger is not, in this case, outweighed by the risk of not being included in the new winning coalition.
A scenario in which both the winning coalition is large and the selectorate is even larger provides the least amount of stability to a leader’s occupancy of power; such a system is a democracy.
Because of this fact—that the leader cannot convince winning coalition members to remain loyal through private good incentives, which are in turn cost-restrictive—the challenger poses the greatest threat to the incumbent.
Joseph Stalin held more power over the Russian people than the tsars before him because the Soviet Union was a large-selectorate system.
Under the tsar, only aristocrats could serve in senior government positions, but the communists abolished the aristocracy and made all Russians equal in principle.
By analyzing the bilateral aid transfers by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations between 1960 and 2001, they discovered that leaders in aid recipient countries are more likely to grant policy concession for donors when the winning coalition is small because leaders with small winning coalitions can easily reimburse supporters for their concession (such as dictatorial Egypt’s domestically unpopular but internationally desirable normalisation of relations with Israel).
