Fascinating podcast about the incentives of leaders. Main thesis: institutional constraints select for and strongly define leadership behavior.
Each leader is faced with the same problem - that of staying in power, usually accomplished by gifting the “selectorate” with resources gained from taxation. When this group is small, dictatorship results, and when this group is large, societies are more democratic. There is an interesting mention of several leaders - King Leopold in Belgium and the Congo, and Chiang Kai-Shek in China and Taiwan, where different institutional constraints led to really different leadership styles by the same leader, sometimes simultaneously. Also mentioned are Lee Kuan Yew and Mao Zedong.
At the end of the podcast, he advances an argument against term limits, which seems to approve of the way governance in Singapore works - the argument states that term limits cause lame duck terms, when leaders are no longer incentivized by re-election and are then free to give out political favors.