One theme that has emerged from the recent literature on political economy concerns the transition to democracy: why would dominant elites give up oligarchic power? This book addresses the fundamental question of democratic stability and the collapse of tyranny by considering a formal model of democracy and tyranny. The formal model is used to study elections in developed polities such as the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Canada, and Israel, as well as complex developing polities such as Turkey. The key idea is that activist groups may offer resources to political candidates if they in turn adjust their polities in favor of the interest group. In polities that use a "first past the post" electoral system, such as the US, the bargaining between interest groups and candidates creates a tendency for activist groups to coalesce; in polities such as Israel and the Netherlands, where the electoral system is very proportional, there may be little tendency for activist coalescence. A further feature of the model is that candidates, or political leaders, like Barack Obama, with high intrinsic charisma, or valence, will be attracted to the electoral center, while less charismatic leaders will move to the electoral periphery. This aspect of the model is used to compare the position taking and exercise of power of authoritarian leaders in Portugal, Argentina and the Soviet Union. The final chapter of the book suggests that the chaos that may be induced by climate change and rapid population growth can only be addressed by concerted action directed by a charismatic leader of the Atlantic democracies.

Norman Schofield is Director of the Center in Political Economy, the William R. Taussig Professor of Political Economy, and Professor in the Departments of Economics and Political Science. He is currently working on topics in the theory of social choice, political economy, and democracy. He has written several books, including Multiparty Government (with Michael Laver, in 1990), Social Choice and Democracy (1985), and co-edited three volumes: Political Economy: Institutions, Information, and Representation in 1993, and Social Choice, Welfare and Ethics, in 1995 (both with Cambridge University Press), and Collective Decision Making (Kluwer, 1996); his book, Mathematical Methods in Economics and Social Choice, was published by Springer in 2003, and in 2006 he published Architects of Political Change as well as Multiparty Democracy (with Itai Sened) both with Cambridge University Press. His book, The Spatial Model of Politics was published in December 2007. He has been the recipient of numerous NSF awards, most recently one on valence politics and regime change. In 2003 he was the Fulbright distinguished professor at Humboldt University and in 2007, visiting fellow at ICER in Turin. In Spring 2008 he was the visiting Leitner Professor at YaleUniversity. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April 2005.