Books like The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics is a 2011 non-fiction book by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, published by the company PublicAffairs. It discusses how politicians gain and retain political power.

Bueno de Mesquita is a fellow at the Hoover Institution. His co-writer is also an academic, and both are political scientists.

Michael Moynihan of The Wall Street Journal stated that the writing style is similar to that of Freakonomics. Moynihan added that the conclusions the book makes originate from the fields of economics, history, and political science, leading him to call the authors "polymathic".

Mesquita and Smith, with other authors, previously wrote about the "selectorate" theory in the academic book The Logic of Political Survival.: 1095