variety of different ways, with the book is also started to some degree of political pundits because there is a common argument and politics that we need more competitive elections, and that don't think these arguments a very well thought out. part of the problem with these arguments is that they come from a belief that elections are analogous to market. when the competition in markets, therefore we need a competitive election. i don't think that analogy holds. it's more useful to think of elections as an plumb the mechanisms. ..

>> i have some counterintuitive arguments about election won and lost is design, but ultimately none of those policies will work if voters are unwilling to posed a credible threat to fire incumbents who do a bad job. >> thank you. >> coming up next, book tv

presents "after words," an hour-long program where we invite guest hosts to interview authors. this week bruce bueno de mesquita and alastair smith present their collaborative work, the dictator's handbook. the acclaimed new york university professors explain how autocrats and dictators are able to maintain power by doing whatever is necessary to please the coalition that will support their regime. they explore their theory with associate press national security editor anne gearan. >> host: hello. i'm anne gearan. we're going to talk today about a new book, the dictator's handbook which as i understand builds on work that both of you have done over a number of years in some previous political science work. can you explain how "the dictator's handbook" is different from your previous

theories about how dictators and autocracies function differently than democracies? and at whom is this book primarily aimed? >> guest: well, the prior work, academic work takes on a political survival. there's no calculus in this book. there are no statistics in this book. is not even algebra in this book. that's an important difference. >> host: a little math, right? >> guest: this is a book aimed at intelligent politically interested audience, people who read "the new york times," "the wall street journal," economists, people like that. the earlier work was aimed at the three other academics who want to read 150 pages of calculus. >> we tried here to popularize

and translate difficult technical material into some other straightforward and easy to understand because our arguments are good general. they are about how political organizations, have religious organizations, how corporations can have cherries, any kind of organization works. and so we needed for the purpose of the book as we spend a lot of time talking to students, the fellow academics and, of course, we never talk about the sort of following function is increasing and all the cactus terms and we don't get this is just all the time. we just thought, we decide to write the book. and to be honest it was a book that wrote itself but it was incredibly easy because we have this wonderful idea about how politics w orks. it's based on self-interest and constraints of people have took operate within the system. the jostling of who's going to get their way and who isn't. it was a book that was your story after story fell into

place. we have written it for a general audience. >> host: can you explain more about that theory of self-interest that goes back to your earlier work. is always the case that a leader will act primary in his or her self-interest, trumping every other motivation? >> that's the absolute dominant motivation. people of different things they would like to do. if they have some discretion they may want to advance good public works project. they may want to push some kind of religious preference, but first and foremost you can't do any of that stuff and tell your church herself a power and taken care of the people who keep you in power. so that's what has to be done first. so before anything else people take care of. >> guest: we don't deny it might be benevolent people care about others first, but they're not the one to crush the head that got into the top in the first place. >> host: how for across the

political spectrum does that theory of paramount, self-interest, extend? i can understand any country in which there's a cult of personality, one later he gets to potentially make all of the decisions, that would be an easier model to sustain and it might be in a country where, say, there's a whole to or when all the way on the other side where there's a democratic elected government, how far does not spread? >> guest: the theory apply to all governments, indeed, to all organizations. now, what the three tells us is that leaders need to upgrade to the extent that they can five rules. the problem that they have, which is what you are alluding to, is that depending upon the nature of the political system the amount of constraints they face in changing the way the

system operates is greater or lesser. so as we see it, leaders want to depend on as a people as possible to keep them in power. they want those people to be drawn from as large a pool of available people as possible. they want to tax people as much as they can, subject to the limitation that they not try to tax so much about the economy collapses on their watch, not so much that they have a rebellion. so there's an optimal level. they want to make sure they take those few people they need properly so that those folks will want to defect into somebody else, not anymore. and they don't want to make a mistake of spending money on people who are not essential to keep them in power. as we see it, i dictator,

contrast with a junta later, what people think of a dictator, somebody who depends on very few people drawn from a relatively large pool of people. for example, lending in fact in the universal adult suffrage system in which everybody knew the elections were rigged. but there was a very small probability for any individual that they could get into that little group of insiders. it wasn't the royal family as it had been, and they could get pay off. they could get lots of benefits. as the set of people to depend on gets bigger, it gets too expensive. if you have to bribe 100 people, not you are. if you have to drive 10 million people, it's better to have a policy. so as the coalition to depend on gets bigger, loyalty to the leader gets weaker because the saturating war of the pool so there's not a lot of substitutes, the quality of

policy gets better in the league gets thrown out of office more quickly. so i junta later depends upon a small coalition just like the dictator but a junta later depends upon a small coalition drawn from a small group, for example, of generals. and to daycare depends on small coalition potentially drawn from a huge coalition. so the junta leader doesn't have as much loyalty that face cousineau does much more frequent than the guy, a single coalition but trust me big pool that ever does there were easily replaced. >> host: isn't there an awful lot of rules? you listed the five main once, but it almost sounds as if they could durable dictatorship is a bit of an accident of history. how could all of those things so easily be reproduced in so many countries? >> guest: one of our technical papers is about how it is that some governments it all to be

democratic and some governments evolved to be dictatorial or autocratic. it's actually very easy to construct a dictatorship. take an example, we use this analogy in the book, suppose there's a rule of 100 people and five of us are going to run that room that no one else does. so dictatorship, creation of dictatorship is generally about controlling violence, controlling the opportunity to engage in violence and not being hesitant about using it. democracy is about being very hesitant to use it because we will throw the rascals out. we vote with the ballot box instead of the boat. it's much harder to construct democracy and dictatorship. >> host: by your model

democracy is much more self-limiting operation, right? you can do all of those things over and over and over and over and over again in a democracy because as you say they will throw the bums out. but it also just sort of isn't built that way, right? you can't bribe that many people, you can't effectively run that large an organization if people keep getting to vote on how that organization is being run. am i correct? >> we have a executive that makes decision. we have leaders. we choose to retain them. the basis of the theory is what's it mean to do things that we like? it turns out things that we like depend upon how many of us get to pick. the basis of the ugly. in a democracy that many, many people. in the u.s., to be president you need about 35, 34, 35 million votes is enough to win the presidency. we might think of as a democracy but that's a country of over

300 million people. not everybody is eligible. if you can pick the right folks and the right state you can when half of the electoral college seats. that's always the thing to remember i is that the president gets workload, but how many does he need? we can sort of see that congress, the debate tailored toward rewarding a small section of society. if we take the system down to even smaller system, for example, we could go, let's move away from politics and talk about business enterprise. we might sort of wonder why is it the wall street firms have been paying a huge bonuses, they want to rip their liver out. people feeding from the public perch. and what is the reason you're? well, most corporations run like hypocrisy to its relatively small number of board members, senior executives, institutional

investors, who are really important. so how do you board a small number of people when you have paid them, giving enormous bonuses? you don't run to my getting a public goods. we set everybody would like to get top 10 the number of people, because that lets them to get fat as well through small number of supporters. >> host: is that why, for example, ceos and board members get paid lots of money, but so do college, you know, big ten football coaches, right? >> the highest paid government employee at the federal level in the united states is the coach of the army football team. >> host: really? >> alister makes a very important point about democracy. democratic leaders have the misfortune of meeting a lot of

people to support them but they work as hard as they can to reduce that number of people. congress is one of the least popular institutions in the united states. and yet an infinite number of congress has a 95% probability of reelection. why is that? that's because the politicians have chosen their voters. the voters are not choosing the politicians. they choose their voters by gerrymandering. they rig the system so they don't really have to answer to so many people. and two gave -- and who do they favor? we have a rhetorical question. journalist would have us believe that president obama wants to raise taxes on the rich, and that's republicans want to cut benefits to the poor. we prefer to express that differently. president obama wants to raise taxes on republican voters, and

republicans want to cut benefits to democratic voters. because that doesn't cost their constituents anything. it helps to enrich their position except for the other guy. >> host: the subtitle of your book is "why bad behavior is almost always good politics." can you talk a little bit about perhaps some of the exceptions to this over all three? why is it almost always? >> guest: once in a blue moon, once in a blue moon, it becomes in everyone's interest to become a more inclusive society. so there's actually sort of one of the fascinating things, slightly one of the harder things to get a grasp of is i'm thinking sort of the development of institutions, when does the aristocrats, when did they go along with wanting to bring people in. we find aristocrats like to think. they like junta, very small

country system. want to get away from that, start expanding they want to keep increasing, they want to bring more and more people in. it's always in the interest. the leaders nearly always want to contract society. the coalition can go either way. the people of course are outside of the system who are privileged, they always want to make the system more and more democratic, more and more inclusive. so relatively few times will leaders actually ever want to switch from being i incenses contracting. a few times have gone on add up to this post is when you close to bankrupt the real problem with running a oppressive society as it does encourage people to do anyway. if people don't do any work you can't tax them. so we find a lot of examples of when we see liberalization, when politicians actually do good things, they do good things because they can't pay off their cronies without doing good things. so this start to liberalize and

we can see the arab spring where the lead up into giving into the problems with egypt. economy was doing very badly. and economy this they started on tourism. means you have to have an educated population. reform carries on. some manage to get ahead of the ball and they can just keep liberalizing enough, always so that they do for the protest. and eventually a resource poor country that is left to its own devices will democratize. jerry kunzman and tries have a people socials resolution pashtun revolution. he runs out of money. the country is completely broke. years of dictatorship have destroyed. the cocoa crop is gone. but he goes to the soviet says i want to be socials, give me

money. he had to turn around to go to people and do good things and the people that came into power eventually more and more good things. he delivered more and more good things. easy leader who in hindsight looks like the poster boy coverage in the, liberal economic reform but the reality was a crack at what he could avoid it. he'll get good things when he was forced to. >> host: in the way he assumed, an example of the entire theory? right? it was a self interested to change, so he figured out how am i going to stay in power, how am i going to keep this whole operation running, not the way i did before but the best way i can do for me. >> guest: that's why almost always bad things always do, do you the best chance of staying in power. once in a while that means doing good things. >> host: you mentioned the

arab spring. what did hosni mubarak do wrong? he was a dictator for three decades. he ran one of the most successful countries in the middle east, boat work of the u.s. policy in the mideast, which did some good things like, instead of peace with israel. what did he do wrong? >> guest: and ask a question. let me preface this by saying victory and a dictator example, may 5, 2010, we predicted that hosni mubarak would be out in a year. >> host: excellent. >> guest: the first thing he did wrong, he had no control. he got old. dictatorial leaders are in deep trouble under three conditions to start with. they have just come to power, they don't quite know where the money is so nobody quite trusts that they will be paid off

properly so they shop around. if you survive the first couple of years you're golden fo for a long time, until either the ben ali problem. you are believed to have had a terminal. this is what they did. or, what's wrong with terminal illness? your cronies know you're no longer a reliable source of payment for the future. or your very old. very old is a terminal illness. so they again know you're not so reliable. suffers problem, he grew old. easy to. second problem, his economy didn't have a vast amount of natural resource wealth. he depended on two sources of, two sources of wealth. one was, for example, tourism. tourism required a relatively

well-educated population. you have to have a lot of english speakers, french speakers. these are people who have enough education that they can think independently, because they come together in business, associations, begin to organize, free assembly, very, very, very bad for dictator. so he had the undergirding of that, and for name. foreign aid is a great way to pay off your cronies if you're not generating an effective economy. president obama announced when he promulgated his afghan policy shortly after he announced he was cutting foreign aid in have. indeed, within a few days, maybe two weeks, at this announcement is cutting foreign aid to egypt in half the egyptian foreign minister, the first time since 1979, referred to israel as egypt's enemy.

and if you're a military leader, perhaps sitting there thinking, well, the guys getting old and decrepit and is not able to manage his relationship with the united states well enough to keep the money really flowing. most of that money is coming to we, the military leaders. now it's getting cut off. maybe we better look around for somebody else. maybe we should hedge our bets. so now you're seeing there on the sidelines, one of these roads of well-educated people, unemployed, paying double the price for food and you're thinking, you know, the military is by going to sit on its hand, they will hedge their bets because the money is drying up. this is the time to rebuild. so that is as we saw it the perfect storm in egypt, completely consistent with the are you in the book that we use to evaluate that.

we have done some sophistical analysis on the countries that two or three years down the road were most likely to face regime change. israel, tunisia, morocco, jordan were near the top of the list. in fact, egypt was at the top of the list. there was little he could do about the problem. you city did some good things like peace with israel. as we look at it, peace with israel was not a policy favored. we could see it very clear now that the egyptian people favored. he needed to have something to sell to the united states for money. something that we would value it enough to pay a lot for. son of a gun, peace with israel. >> host: and protect them. >> guest: exactly. and we did just that it's not a

policy that the egyptian people were brought along with that we should love our fellow man across the border. a big campaign to educate tolerance towards religion. israel was still on the grassroots, treated as an enemy. this is precisely what the government would want because you can come if the people would -- you can't sell we like the israelis as a public policy. we still see egyptian textbooks that say the israelis are not good people, because we want to encourage hatred because we can so that. we can sort of see that taking u.s. aid is not a popular policy. the survey people to a big worldwide global study and it's amazing that the countries they pick out as the ones having the most anti-american feelings are the ones that get huge amounts of u.s. aid. the big oil countries.

they're not liberal democracy. they are monies to take enormous amount of a to undertake u.s. policies that are highly unpopular. the pakistanis, they hate the americans. the afghans, they hate the americans. the egyptians, they hate the americans. we paid their leader to get the money to pay off the military to keep the people down to adopt a policy that they don't like. they should be pretty miffed. >> host: two things about egypt. in this entire discussion here we have it said the word ties your square. it is a separate and i guess utterly independent from your theory of flight egypt was primed to fall and the bark was primed to fall. that they would be proper demonstrations, that i think is the worldwide idea of why he fell. >> guest: not quite separate from the three.

so, take a step back and ask yourself why people were willing to demonstrate, and they weren't going to demonstrate five years ago. they had less to lose because things were going badly in egypt for them. and they had more to gain, because exactly because the foreign aid was cut in half, they would've had a a reason to believe that they will not face asked about of oppression which they would have faced five years earlier. so from the way we think about this, we think about this from the game theory perspective, they are doing what is called a backward induction. your guy on the street, thinking do i want to demonstrate? no. i'm going to get my head bashed. a little more educated, do i want to demonstrate? not yet this year but now it's see the situation is changing. the loyalty of the military has

been shaken. yeah, maybe we will sit on our hands but the risk of getting my head bashed in is still there but it's lower. so if it gets low enough waiting of people it's worth it. than others observe gee, nothing happened to these folks. the military did not bashed their heads. the military even protected them from the police who did try to bashed their heads. more people take to the street. it's exactly this calculation is the leader vulnerable. people would always like to overthrow dictators. the problem most is that it's a very risky thing to do. when the moment arises then they seize that moment. >> guestmoment. >> host: in the egyptian kaisha identified a few minutes ago the first to recognize and act that was the military which was always the backbone of the country, and certainly was a big part of the reason the bark was able to stay as long as he was. now that the military is now my in charge they have announced

elections for, well, they are in charge. they've announced elections for november. do you think that elections will actually proceed in egypt, or will the military make second calculation that this holding pattern is probably better than the risk of an election? >> guest: i think you're entirely right to say this holding pattern will continue, because we have an election. so we'll have elections are probably unlikely to be truly meaningful. unlikely to be a large amount of repress. there's a reinstitution of sort of the hated marshall law, given short shrift by the courts. so there's not going to be a large-scale demonstration. they will use repression against religious extremists, groups arising, threatened the

stability. so we're not going seek a particularly fair election. one of the great advantages we discussed earlier of having an election, particularly for the council much is an election is a great way of telling anybody that they can rise to the top. and anyone can be brought inside the government and become a a person of importance to the precise because a lot of people can be brought in, everyone who was inside -- that's the beauty of holding elections. we are not big believers enforcing election on countries where they are not really going to be meaningful. so in some sense, pakistan might of been better when it continued to be under military. in both cases the reality was only a small section of society. in one case though that small section of society doesn't have replacements. the leader has to work hard in order to keep, in the shores? no, the army very happy. wherein you've got an election

doesn't work well. it's a subsidy mechanism to let everybody know you are easily replaced. and, therefore, they will do the dirty work that you ask them to do for a small amount of money. they are more loyal friend what i want to follow up on something they're, so there's a guy who has a successful military coup, takes of the country and becomes for his own self interest a u.s. partner, if not an ally, post 9/11. otherwise they will blow up, you know, india my country, blow me up, whatever. the better thing to do is help the americans go after terrorists. the first thing the americans do after saying thank you and giving him the zillions of dollars is to say you have to take off your uniform and hold elections. was that a strategically poor choice for the united states?

because musharraf was more useful to us in his previous role? >> guest: i'm going to answer that two ways. was a strategic error for the united states? yes. do politicians in control and the united states differ from politicians elsewhere in the world? no. what do i mean by that? they are interested in what is good for them and habits to be good for united states, that's terrific. if it happens not to be good for the united states but it is good for them, that, too, is terrific. so their calculation is how do my constituents respond to this? not how does france strategy, but how do my constituents react? my constituents don't like our backing military dictators. so they're going to react to

promote the policy. >> host: so sticking with pakistan for a bit here, there is a popularly elected government in pakistan. backed by the military, generally to really run the show. does that model still fit your theory? i mean, can you have essentially a front man? can you have somebody out there who is the person with whom the united states deals directly, who is mentioned in your book, somewhat admire him for his ability, there you go. >> guest: is good at its. >> host: perhaps could talk about that. eca dictator? does he fit your model?

>> guest: this is the beauty of the democratic systems. we would like to thank of the classic one might, one vote, one more person one vote. this is the way we like to think about elections function. but in many cases we find that people actually implicitly in the voting in big blocks. so if you were to think of the pakistan? , a rural area, a politician will show up and go make an implicit deal with the village elders. but they will get stuck. they won't be getting much because there's lots of other people they can buy them for. but they are going to get a few jobs. they will go that way. there will be some crumbs down to that those. so doing those votes for a politician is almost always going to win any particular area. it's going to get the most fuel crumbs. when people go along with with the village elders tells him what to do, if you have people

isolate, politicians are very good time to mull. we will give you a few little things, not much but if you don't for us we'll get elected in what and we will give you nothing. during the floods last year, i went with a colleague who was not at the university of essex. him and i are looking at natural disasters. one of the things we saw was the distribution of a. it was vastly towards zardari supports. the probability of him getting any assistance greatly increased if you came from regimes that supported parties are part of his party. they came from the opposition you got nothing. simple things we think of as handing out blankets, driven by the politics. we see the same thing in the u.s. but it turned and the federal disaster aid we can predict which district are going -- this has become a burdening of the technical literature. it turns out elections are just

as important as wind speed. but not to the same extent it is in pakistan but in pakistan, there were instances where if we take, if we break the dam here we can run this water through this into the desert and save hundreds of villages downstream. unfortunately the guy whose line is going to go to his member of cabinet answer would've on the bridge after this isn't going to happen. we see bad public policy. we see redistribution with saving the few chosen, even though the system is nominally democratic. >> guest: one of the things we are hoping to cure people of with a dictators have, is the distinction of categorical regimes, democracy, autocracy, monarchy, junta. for instance, we talk about this winning coalition, all democracies have the characteristic that the selectric is very large, the

pool of people. and the winning coalition is relatively larger but highly variable in size. in britain, to control the prime ministership, a candidate, the two-party race, needs to win half of the parliamentary districts, half of those, they only need 75% of the vote. 75% of vote is properly distributed it could've gone the other way. in the united states we estimate that you control the house, the senate and the presidency with as little as 20% of the vote. when you are going out you're focused on who to us only have to have the. in other systems you need much closer to a simple majority of the vote. it varies all over the place. in pakistan, you need a very small percentage of the vote to control the country. i think we as this summer, i

don't member exact, somewhere around 10%. that fundamental changes how much public good you do and how much corruption you engaging. they will be a lot more crap than we are. will they be as corrupt as north korea? no way. north korea depends on maybe 200 people out of almost 20 million people. it can be much more corrupt, but zardari is in a position to steal a heck of a lot and to allow his coalition of backers to steal a heck of a lot. that's why devout loyalty and. they think is better policy ideas prevailed loyal to him because he's making sure the blankets go to them and not to the other person who was flooded who didn't vote the right way. >> guest: so, continuing the sort of u.s.-centric line of questioning here just for a minute, what the u.s. now wants from zardari and pakistan is two

things basically. one, keep a lid on terrorism so it doesn't become an external threat to the united states, whether in afghanistan or elsewhere. and sort of a subset of that, specifically go after these groups that primarily operate along the afghan border. is that, neither of which pakistan has been fully, despite -- so if, in these it in zardari's interest to stay in power, to follow the rules of the dictator's handbook, to do any of those things? >> guest: just before "the dictator's handbook," i wrote a different book. the penultimate chapter of the book is about how much aid it would take the united states, from the united states to get to

pakistani to pursue the taliban and so forth. it's about one and half billion a year. and the book makes the point that for that amount of money we will get the optimal effort. we shouldn't expect them to wipe out the taliban. we shouldn't expect them to wipe out al qaeda in pakistan, because if they do the money will start. we have no reason to give them money. that's the objective. if they fix upon. as much as the bark didn't not work hard to educate them. it's the money would stop blowing. the zardari government, was working reasonably hard at tracking down and killing or capturing taliban and al qaeda leaders. in february of 2010, they killed the number two talibans leader and so forth. so they were delivering enough to keep the money flowing.

they have an additional problem, again goes back to three, there's not a pakistani leader. so zardari has his set of cronies. the ish has its own interest. the rest of military has other interests. so yes to we the coalition together. not been very good at getting the isi on board. so the and are questions of so, what would it take to change their behavior or then we are willing to pay. because there longer-term interest is get us out of the way, a line with these guys just make the is essentially operating organizationally the way you lay out, right? transeventy is sort of irrelevant. they have to figure out how are we strategically going to be able to continue our power base and to be able to call the shots to the extent possible.

afghanistan, we have to worry about india, so they are looking out -- >> guest: they are looking out for them. and doing a good job, unfortunately. >> host: we were talking about egypt, about the sort of, the gradual willingness of people to take greater risk, to demonstrate against the government, to go against the government, period. how does that contract in libya where we did see protest taking place, and in syria now, we have seen protests taking place in the face of really horrific government violent, that people are willing to brave. >> guest: libya is a case where moammar gadhafi violated one of the five rules that bruce with a early. he made a classic mistake. he was too nice to the people.

find that hard to believe because we live in the united states where president is in the home of 359 people so he's got to keep a lot of us have to. moammar gadhafi didn't have that problem, yet compared to some of his neighbors, libyans get substantially more education than neighbors and yemen, in south arabia, in egypt, and jordan and industry. he did need to educate the people. most of his oil was extracted by foreign workers. if they protest teacher sends them home and gets more. in 2005 with a country that was mentioned, he had the biggest restrictions on press freedoms. outlier in terms of how draconian restrictions were. 2010 he was forced -- allowed

people to start to talk. has to be probably be we get a bargain soda people say the regime is not the strongest without so that's more information they think maybe it safe, everything is going wrong. and so people took to the streets. he had given them the opportunity to organize. he hadn't broken enough, he hadn't been smashing in enough heads and people took this as a sign of weakness. i don't think he was that week but then nato military started, and the people who are willing to break kids seized. he had phenomenal loyalty. this people backing him, even he is stuck in remote towns that but he still has fanatic supporters who are staying loyal to the very end. >> guest: not a happy year of the world. >> guest: the sad thing is i think this has been a really poor and limited policy by the way. because the rails is the next

group of leaders that i going to unfrozen assets. you have billions of dollars pouring in, oil revenue will come back and. the country is awash with weapons. people will be fighting to become the monopolist in terms of power. who can buy the most oil to get the weapons pointed at everybody else. and from there they will collapse. they will be back in the same type of system that we have before. we're going to be leader who will be very hard to buy because he's got lots going well. and he will be grew to the people to a given set of people will be persecuted to the people that were persecuted under the former. i don't see anything different changing, and he made an error. it's unlikely that the next that is going to make the same mistake. >> guest: the syrian case looks quite different. and, indeed, we are by pessimistic about the future of libya. were optimistic about the future of syria.

there are places where we are optimists. in the syrian case, aside was looking at an economy with 9% deficit annually, relative to gdp. a very big -- we complain that they are way, way ahead. and so he was facing an economy i can with some educated people, unemployed. he had some natural resource wealth unlike libya's was rapidly declining coming over as a small and smaller part of the common. foreign aid to syria was slowly drying up. so all of the economic conditions were bad news for him, making the risk more attractive than before. he has been brutal in his or sponsor to that risk. people have continued to fight. and because syria does not have

vast national resource wealth, then if this is not also flooded with foreign aid when assad finally falls can see will probably become a reasonably liberalized place. if it's flooded with foreign aid out of good intentions, very bad news because then the new leaders will be in a position to do the bribery that's necessary, shore themselves up and no need to listen to other people. we have to hope the foreign aid doesn't come except after performance benchmarks are met. have free assembly, have free press, et cetera. have free speech. you can borrow against promised aid for a year. if you don't get the lump, if you meet those conditions, you get it promised again. escrowed for the next year intel your entrenched in free speech, free press, freedom of assembly. you have those things in place, it's tough for leaders to be oppressive.

>> host: so these are advice been to president obama that he not reward any of these governments to richly, whatever, you know, civilian may be slightly military flavor government emerging in egypt, potential fall on to assad, keep your distance? >> guest: each of more competition i want to come back to the. in general, yes. in general, one of the big effects of foreign aid is to significantly increase the probability that an oppressive dictatorial regime stays in power. it has a significant impact on the survival of dictators. so egypt is more complicated because although that remains true, the president has to play that against the impact of hostility towards israel on his

reelection prospects. so basically -- not national interest, politicians interest. so in that case, one of two things has to happen. we either going to have to pay a lot bigger price to israel, if for example, there is an election and the muslim brotherhood, in egypt, the muslim brotherhood in line with the military and told the country, the price of maintaining good relations with israel goes way up. so we have to decide. much higher price? is that worth it o we leave it e israelis and others to manage that problem on their own? my guess is we will pay the price. >> host: we don't have a minute left. alister, let you have the last word. you've given a little bit of advice to present obama in an

article in foreign policy this month. what's the single worst thing that president obama could do in the couple years he's got left, according to your theory? >> guest: you use the term worse. we want to go back to the worst, we talk about the u.s. as a whole? over talk about -- so he could spend all his time and resources focusing on making the u.s. great. that might not be such a great policy for him or for the democrats come the next election. so we have, i want to clarify your question. if he wants to do the best for him, which is what we expect he will and according to the incentive he has he should be doing, he will be trying to shore up democratic voters. you will be trying to make sure we have benefits for unions, we get more education for teachers because teachers and union

workers are both the democratic. how are we going to fund these? we want to tax the rich. the rich tend to be republican voters. we want to redistribute it out. the best thing would be for him making his supporters the ones he needs to be as happy as possible. the republicans want him out of office. they will try to do exactly the stuff, they will cut benefits. that lets them have tax breaks for the rich. a.k.a. the republicans. >> host: thank you very much both of you. i really enjoyed the book, and i look forward to having a chance to hear more about it as i guess it comes out right today. >> guest: today is that they. >> host: great. thank you very much. >> guest: thank you very much.

that was "after words," booktv signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policy makers, legislators and others familiar with the material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9 p.m. on sunday and 12 a.m. on monday. you can watch "after words" online. go to booktv.org and click on "after words" on the upper right side of the page. >> karen beckwith political women and american democracy. how did you decided which essays to include in this work? >> my co-editors and i organize the project on american democracy at the university of notre dame that we would convene by our estimation the best

scholars on women in politics in the u.s., now in the u.s. but scholars who are working on u.s. women of politics fix we brought together a range of people for the research we knew well. and convened for a two-day conference at notre dame. after which at the conference we discuss all the manuscripts that constitute the chapters of this book. and had some commentary about it and discussion to an been put together as an edited collection which can bridge university press published in 2008. >> describe the role of the women described in this book. >> let me tell you what we are not doing in this book. were not looking of public policy per se. we are not looking at women in the executive because even the 2008 there were so few women in the executive and not yet a major female candidate for the nomination for president of a major political party in the united states. the very few women in executive level which meant that the

research wasn't there yet to have a good discussion. we didn't address women in the judiciary. collectively address. we look at behavior of women as voters. the beat of women as candidates for office both state and national office. behavior of women within political parties, the behavior of women once elected to national office. we have a huge -- a look at the gendered nature of political institutions as well as u.s. politics the women of politics in the context of comparative politics. that is, what does the situation look like in the u.s. compared to the rest of the world? the picture that is not so pleasant actually. we have one of the least advantageous electoral systems at the national level for women, which is a single member plurality system with some modification. the state level, we also have only two major political parties which are informal and their internal construction, have no

clear formal instructions for the coming -- become a candidate, offer very little clear structure means by which women can work the parties to increase women's candidacy. so there's lots of disadvantages women have in the united states. spinning in relation to the political parties, as a woman voter, what are the findings related to encouraging, directly related to women's? >> interesting things. first there are more women than there are men in the u.s. citizens rate. secondly, women have slightly higher registration rates and evening. and women turn out at higher coastline higher percentages benjamin. the larger number of the number of women combined with women's heightened turnout makes for a big electoral impact. women also are

disproportionately democratic. this is true across all age groups and is also true across all racial groups. racial and ethnic groups, women still have a slight preference for the democratic party compared to men. so when we come into an election, things like turn and the range of issues that might attract women are very important. women are more likely than men to go for the democratic presidential candidate. that's been the case since 1992. that gap has been between two percentage points to five percentage points, depending upon what you look at. there is a democratic advantage in the electorate for the democratic party. in general because of women. that's the numbers that turnout for the democratic party. the issues that seem to mobilize women and attract their votes have to do with social welfare issues, have to do with foreign policy issues and also to a certain extent so-called morality issues. but on these women varies in

different direction. same-sex marriage, women are much less opposed to that than are men, for example. not by huge part but nonetheless there is a difference. women are more concerned with foreign policy security issues, and economic impact on women's vote. and, finally, women are more concerned about social welfare issues. things like health care, employment, the state of the economy, education. >> with a woman candidate for president coming into the campaign, do you see those change in 2012? are based on your research do you think they will largely remain the same? >> i see no female candidate come to the presidential candidacy in 2012. there are only two on the list that i know of, sarah palin has not yet declared, and michele bachman who is doing very poorly right now in early returns, or early poll results in the republican party on debates.

and in the polling numbers for her. i don't see either of them being the ultimate candidate for the republican party. on the democratic side all things being equal, the current president would be the party candidate. so that will foreclose any opportunity for a woman in the party to come forward. so i see no presents for women as presidential candidates in 2012. let me do say that some polling data, the most recent iciness only been from 2008 coming in very early on 2008 presidential primaries. about 87% of americans are willing to say that they would vote for a qualified woman, regardless of sex that they would be as went to vote for a woman as to vote for a man. americans are more likely, more willing to vote for someone who is african-american or someone jewish or president than they are for a woman. and i think that number is slightly lower than had been the previous results because in 2008

there was a clear candidate and that was a clinton on the democratic side who ultimately failed to win the nomination. >> so what are some recommendations for women in that position, or running for office? does that matter come up in your book? >> we don't turn to the presidential specifically but we do look at women's candidacy for lower level office. so, a couple of recommendations. these are not recommendations for women. let me just make clear, we only need about 4000 women nationwide to contest and win elections, to have ample representation in the senate and the house and the statehouses. there are not that many elected offices at the legislative level at least that requires we need 1 million qualified women. i think we can find say, 4000 qualified women to run. so that's not the issue.

the problem is not with women. it is with political parties. and the unavailability of access to candidacies. both to the cut income is effectively have as we do, 83% of congress consisting of men, and most of those men are incumbents. they will be very difficult for new candidates whether or not the candidates are women. so part of it has to do with political parties, willingness to persuade members of congress comes to the dems of congress to step down, willing to support women challenging incumbents within their own parties, willingness to recruit women for office. right now the so-called big money people on republican side are trying to recruit governor christie from new jersey to enter the presidential nomination race on the republican side which he so far at least still has refused to do. there are women that might be recruited. there's some very good female governors on the republican side who might be