Throughout the book, Svolik utilizes a variety of methodology ranging from large N quantitative analysis to historical qualitative methods to analyze his theories and claims. Svolik begins outlining his methods of studying dictators by conceptualizing dictatorship (see concepts) and creating a database to identify dictatorships and democracies. Using that definition, Svolik finds 4,696 country years from the period of 1946-2008 for his analysis. Svolik also introduces the authoritarian spell to analyze how regimes originate and end. Creating such a rigid definition of dictatorship is important because it clearly delineates what is and is not a dictatorship, which is a key foundation for Svolik’s work.

Svolik organizes his data under three levels of observation: country level, ruling coalition level, and leader level. Svolik uses this method to avoid the pitfall of attempting to classify dictatorships into certain categories, which can overlook the heterogeneity of these regimes. For example, at the country level, Svolik can analyze military involvement, political party restrictions, selection of executive and legislative politicians. Thus, Svolik’s strategy for analyzing dictatorships is both “mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive”, making coding more reliable and able to account for heterogeneity in dictatorships (2012, p.38). This is a very important part of Svolik’s methodology because it accounts for the vast differences among dictatorships and prevents the overlap that arises from using rigid categories.

Throughout each of the main chapters (3-6), Svolik began by describing his theories using qualitative historical analysis of various dictatorships. This qualitative work provides real-world examples of the problems of power-sharing and authoritarian control that Svolik’s theories are based on. Following description of the theories, Svolik employed formal game theory to lay the groundwork for the following empirical section. In each chapter, formal models and variables were created to explain how these theories work within a dictatorship. These theories and models are then confirmed or disproved using quantitative analysis in the final section of each chapter. Using statistical methods, Svolik empirically analyzes how accurate his theories about the politics of dictatorships are.