{"schema_version":"bf_book_companion_v1","release_id":"20260414T102527Z","book":{"amazon_purchase_url":"https://www.amazon.com/dp/1541701364?tag=bookfrontier-20","asin":"1541701364","authors":["Bruce Bueno de Mesquita","Alastair Smith"],"book_id":"9781541701366","canonical_url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/9781541701366","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9781541701366.jpg?v=20260414T102527Z%3A2026-04-14T10%3A25%3A27Z","description":"“A lucidly written, shrewdly argued meditation on how democrats and dictators preserve political authority.” — Wall Street Journal Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith’s canonical book on political science turns conventional wisdom on its head. They start from a single proposition: leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don’t care about the “national interest”—or even their subjects—unless they must. As Bueno de Mesquita and Smith show, democracy is essentially just a convenient fiction. 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