In Winning Hearts and Votes, Steven Brooke asks a fundamental question in comparative political economy: How does welfare provision by nonstate actors translate into effective political mobilization for the organizations providing the services? He addresses this question in the context of authoritarian regimes where space for political competition is constrained and where allowing opposition actors the opportunity to generate support through welfare provision is risky. This question is examined through an important specific case—that of medical welfare provision by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The book makes significant contributions both to our understanding of the politics of welfare services and of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as an organization.

The book seeks to address three related puzzles. First, why would autocratic regimes allow potential challengers to develop extensive social service networks? The answer Brooke provides is that, under conditions of state fiscal weakness, service provision can be tolerated or even encouraged in autocratic regimes, because it provides “shock absorbers for a vulnerable citizenry” (p. 11). This could be initially attractive because it lowers the chances of public protest, but it also makes it difficult for the state to reclaim the ceded social service space later on, as Hosni Mubarak discovered in Egypt.

A second, and central, puzzle of the book is this question: Under what conditions does social service provision lead to electoral support for the organization that sponsors the service? In the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, one might assume that religious or ideological affinity motivates those who both provide and benefit from the service. Therefore, clients of the Brotherhood’s services would share the religious affinities of the political movement and thus also provide political support based on that affinity. Alternatively, the poor beneficiaries of social services might become political clients of the Brotherhood in exchange for their care, effectively paying back the Brotherhood with votes during elections.

Brooke does an effective job of complicating both of these common assumptions by demonstrating that service providers were more professionals than ideologues, that services were not provided based on religion, and that the paying middle classes (not the poor) were the Brotherhood’s clients. He provides evidence that the Brotherhood received significant electoral support from non-ideological, middle-class voters who benefited from its medical service provision. These are the voters who are more likely to feel like they have political choices in an autocratic regime, because they are less financially dependent than poor voters on established patterns of state clientelism.

This leads to a third puzzle: Why do beneficiaries of those services actually cast their votes in support of the Brotherhood? After an examination of the client experience at Brotherhood medical facilities and through the use of a survey experiment, Brooke argues that they vote for the Brotherhood because their experience with the professional care at the organization’s medical facilities serves as a proxy with which to make political judgments about Brotherhood electoral candidates. This medical care was effective because it targeted primarily those who could pay for it, thus ensuring a revenue stream that could be reinvested into the quality of care. Paying clients voted for the Brotherhood because “high quality and compassionate care” (p. 20), without implied political obligation, translated into positive judgments about the effectiveness of Brotherhood-affiliated candidates.

In sum, Brooke argues that authoritarian governments will allow for nonstate service provision when they are under fiscal duress, that this service provision leads to opposition political support in middle-class districts, and that it does so because it serves to enhance the reputation of opposition politicians among voters there who have the flexibility to choose whom to support at the ballot box. This argument reframes “the Islamist political advantage” of the book’s title from an advantage due to religious identity to one of competence in service provision that has generalizable appeal to those beyond religious ideologues (p. 149). Brooke makes this argument through a multifaceted research design that incorporates historical, ethnographic, geospatial, and survey methodologies that tell a compelling and theoretically informed story about the evolution and political success of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The book has a wide range of strengths, which should make it essential reading for anyone interested in Egyptian politics, Islamist politics, and in nonstate social service provision more broadly. Brooke goes to considerable lengths to use multiple research strategies that enable him to test his hypotheses. The questions that he asks are intrinsically difficult to evaluate because of the data-poor environment in authoritarian regimes like Egypt, but through a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods he is able to triangulate a range of evidence that makes his arguments very plausible.

Brooke provides a richer analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood’s social service provision than has been done to date, particularly when it comes to the focus of his study, the Islamic Medical Association (IMA). The book includes detailed ethnographic observations, primary documents, and unique datasets on the Brotherhood’s medical service provision across several distinct time periods. Particularly notable is his original evidence on the geography of medical service provision, both fixed medical facilities and mobile medical caravans. He also details a May 2014 survey experiment examining perceptions of Brotherhood facilities and the corresponding propensity of respondents to vote for Brotherhood candidates. This provides evidence for the reputational effects of quality service provision. The fieldwork was largely completed in Egypt during 2012–13; it is wonderful that Brooke was on the ground during Egypt’s brief period of democratic opening, because it would be impossible to get the information detailed in the book at present.

One of the trade-offs the author self-consciously makes in this book is to prioritize internal validity over external validity. The specificity of his study (one service provider in Egypt) makes his arguments around that case compelling, but leaves the reader wanting more discussion of the ways in which those arguments may be applicable in other contexts. It would be helpful to situate the IMA within the broader context of the Brotherhood’s service provision and also to more extensively situate the Brotherhood’s service provision within the context of its political competitors or with other Islamist groups. One of the biggest challenges to the book’s arguments actually comes in 2013 during Egypt’s brief democratic opening when the Brotherhood suddenly shifts strategy to providing politicized health care to the poor (something most of the book argues that the Brotherhood actively sought to avoid). Brooke engages with this problem by arguing that this demonstrates how the incentives of political institutions matter, but this suddenly becomes an essential argument that remains underdeveloped in the book.

Although the case study is a specific one, the implications of the book are broad. In the final chapter, Brooke highlights one of the ways it matters to the field of comparative politics: social service provision can be a way of expanding a party’s constituency and escaping “the niche party trap” (p. 146). The book also has important implications for both authoritarian politics and the challenges of democratization processes. Winning Hearts and Votes will long remain a standard for understanding the Muslim Brotherhood’s social service provision, given the dissolution of the group in Egypt’s recent crackdown. It will also provoke significant debates at the intersection of party politics and political economy for some time to come.