ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the laws of politics, primary laws and secondary laws. Primary laws limit the support that the party in control of the government, the incumbents, can generate from the voters, and hence their time in office. Among democracies, the incumbency penalty is higher in presidential than in parliamentary systems, and in the less developed democracies outside the OECD. Secondary laws of politics are strong tendencies that drive all states to centralize and grow relative to the rest of society. The operations of secondary laws are contingent on a number of things. It is better equipped to force the state to correct mistakes, to backtrack from overreaches in policy, and otherwise to accommodate itself within the web of existing social institutions and cultural traditions rather than to replace them in whole or in part. Shifts in parameters effect step-level alterations in the behavior of the system.
