Tripp argues that democratisation leads not only to democracies, but also creates hybrid regimes with distinct features that put them in a category of their own. She further characterises these as ‘semiauthoritarian’ or ‘semidemocratic’, although admitting to ‘considerable fuzziness’ (p. 21) between them – so much so, apparently, that semi-democratic as a type of regime disappears early in the book. Semi-authoritarian regimes are contradictory because they possess characteristics of both democratic and authoritarian polities, but are also stable as they rarely revert to authoritarianism or advance to consolidated democracies (p. 1). In this, she follows a number of writers on democratisation over the past decade who have identified ‘stalled democracy’, the ‘grey zone’ and ‘illiberal democracy’ among others. Tripp does not provide analytic distinctions between the three types of regimes. They differ because they behave differently – the problem she has undertaken to explain (see, for example, the table on p. 12).

The interesting idea lies in her explanation of why certain polities remain trapped in this liminal condition. She scatters its elements through the text, but it could be presented in this way: incumbents who introduce democratic measures, elections, political rights and the rule of law often use a mixture of coercion and patronage to ensure they stay in power. Once they do, they cannot stop. They weaken political structures, even the ones they introduce, in order to maintain personal rule. But they must retain democratic structures to remain legitimate, so they work within them while undercutting their purposes. This requires considerable investment and political skill, as these structures are more than façades and thus outcomes are somewhat uncertain. As time passes, dissension grows among those civilians and military office-holders who hold democratic ideals, are frustrated by denial of patronage or by retribution for opposition, or fundamentally oppose the regime's policies. Such threats force semi-authoritarian rulers to redouble their efforts to maintain power at the expense of democratic structures. Thus, semi-authoritarian regimes remain mired in their own contradictory status.

For evidence, Tripp offers a wide-ranging and up-to-date case study of democratisation in Uganda under Museveni. Here she provides a valuable analysis that debunks the conventional wisdom that Museveni is a democrat, despite Uganda's seeming progress towards democracy. She pulls together useful evidence, partly through her fieldwork, showing that Museveni and his party, the National Resistance Movement, dropped their adherence to inclusive politics once they had consolidated control. She ably traces the rise of a patronage system based in part on corruption and on central influence in local government.

Tripp also correctly identifies and explains a number of paradoxes that are confusing to those not familiar with Ugandan politics: a single party masquerading as a ‘no-party system’, a unified patronage system controlling decentralised local government, a government dominated by politicians and civil servants from the western region despite its stated opposition to ethnic favoritism and, of course, state intervention behind the scenes in supposedly open elections. However, she introduces a lot of informative descriptions of recent events that she does not relate to her central argument. Moreover, there are an unusual number of errors of fact that ought to have been corrected in the editing process.