It is not easy to offer a critical review of Dan Slater's book. Ordering Power makes several major contributions to the study of both state building and authoritarian durability. The book's analysis converges with ours in many areas; in some of these areas, it takes important steps beyond it.

For one, both books focus centrally on incumbent power, and specifically, on what Slater calls the “party-state complex.” Whereas much of the recent literature on authoritarian durability focuses nearly exclusively on ruling parties,Footnote ¹ Slater's brings state power (back) into the center of the analysis. In the 1990s and 2000s, students of regime politics tended to view state power in fairly benign terms—as the source of human and political rights and the rule of law.Footnote ² Analysts viewed state weakness primarily as an obstacle to democratization rather than as a factor that could also undermine authoritarianism. Until recently, little attention was paid to the ways in which the “authoritarian Leviathan” (to use Slater's term) furnishes governments with tools to monitor, co-opt, intimidate, and repress potential opponents, both within and outside the regime.Footnote ³ State power lies at the heart of Slater's brilliant account of the sources of authoritarian durability in Southeast Asia. Whereas our book focuses exclusively on the state's coercive capacity, Slater shows persuasively that state extractive capacity and symbolic power are also critical to sustaining authoritarian rule.

Although our book similarly highlights the importance of state and party strength in sustaining authoritarian rule, Ordering Power goes much further in exploring the historical roots of this strength. Whereas our work stresses the importance of historical origins but does not explore them in depth, Slater's book is “emphatically historical” (p. 277) and makes them a central part of the analysis. His central argument is that endemic contentious politics—which occurs when large-scale “class conflict afflicts urban areas and exacerbates communal tensions” (p. 14)—fosters elite collective action necessary to create a powerful and highly centralized state apparatus. While our work focuses more narrowly on coercive state capacity, Slater highlights the ways in which endemic and unmanageable conflicts compel economic elites to hand over key fiscal powers to the state. The resulting “protection pacts”—seen in Malaysia and Singapore—“extract considerable compliance and resources” (p. 16) from state officials, the middle classes, and economic and communal elites. “An authoritarian Leviathan that continually extracts more revenue from society than it spends to secure social support will find itself on an ever-firmer fiscal footing” (p. 19). By contrast, episodic and manageable conflicts make it harder for authoritarian leaders to garner strong support from economic and other elites. In such cases, contentious politics is not sufficiently threatening to convince elites to transfer resources to the state and “crawl under the apron” of the authoritarian state apparatus (p. 97). The result is a much weaker “provision pact”—exemplified by the Philippines and Thailand—“that survive[s] strictly through patronage and spending” (p. 19). As Slater demonstrates, state strength was critical to regime durability in Malaysia and Singapore, whereas state weakness undermined authoritarian survival in the Philippines and Thailand.

Like our book, Ordering Power thus offers a corrective to recent work that focuses on institutionalized patronage as a primary source of stable authoritarianism.Footnote ⁴ An extensive literature contends that ruling parties facilitate authoritarian stability by credibly guaranteeing “a share of power and the spoils of office over the long run to those who invest in the existing institutions.”Footnote ⁵ Yet, as both of our books demonstrate, regimes that rely primarily on the regularized distribution of spoils to maintain elite support are especially vulnerable to fiscal and other crises that threaten the capacity of governments to deliver the goods. Instead, the most durable authoritarian regimes are rooted in something more than the expectation of regular payoffs. Thus, for Slater, “imminent shared threats” are a far more reliable source of elite cohesion than “the always uncertain prospect of shared material gain” (p. 276). Similarly, our book demonstrates that institutionalized patronage alone provides a far weaker source of cohesion than do nonmaterial ties, particularly those that are forged out of periods of violent struggle.

More generally, Ordering Power nicely integrates material and nonmaterial interests. Slater is rightly critical of recent regime analyses that focus exclusively on class and material interests; although Slater takes class conflict seriously, his case analysis demonstrates the centrality of communal and religious identities in both shaping elite behavior and facilitating mass mobilization. At least in these Southeast Asian cases, it is clear that class identities and material interests alone cannot explain regime outcomes.

Beyond Slater's core argument, the book's case analyses offer an array of important observations and conceptual distinctions that inform our understanding of contemporary authoritarianism. For example, in his account of Ferdinand Marcos's downfall, Slater contrasts Marcos's efforts to portray himself as a “firefighter” deploying repression to douse the flames of instability with the increasing perception of Marcos as an “arsonist” whose autocratic measures were in fact fanning the flames of instability. This discussion highlights a common dilemma for autocrats who raise the spectre of extremism and even stoke chaos in order to play the firefighter role. As Slater acutely observes, however, some autocrats are better equipped, historically and structurally, to play this role than others. Like Marcos and, more recently, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, many risk being perceived by elites as an arsonist and an increasing threat to stability.

Finally, Slater's book demonstrates many of the utilities of qualitative comparative analysis. Over the last fifteen years, the study of regimes has been increasingly taken up by large-n cross-national studies that rely on pre-existing data sets or simple proxy variables. Although some of these studies have made important contributions, many of them suffer from serious problems of measurement validity and weak demonstration of causal mechanisms. As Slater's (and, we hope, our) work shows, rigorous qualitative comparative analysis can be used to demonstrate causal processes in ways that most large-n studies cannot.

Our primary question regarding Slater's analysis lies in the area of generalization. The conditions that give to protection pacts are difficult to meet. Contentious politics must be endemic and unmanageable; conflict must be urban and class based (in that strong mass organizations demand redistribution), but it must also exacerbate communal tensions. Finally, the conflict must occur in a pluralistic context, before the construction of an authoritarian Leviathan. The argument is compelling, certainly in the cases covered in the book. But as Slater makes clear, such conditions exist in few recent cases (the book mentions Spain under Franco, Taiwan under the KMT, South Africa under Apartheid, and—less convincingly—Botswana), most of which no longer exist. Perhaps this simply reflects the empirical reality that there have been few cases of successful state building in the postcolonial world. Yet it is an overstatement to claim that the counterrevolutionary path is the only—or even the predominant—path to elite cohesion, effective state building, and durable authoritarianism. Insisting on such a claim forces Slater to imply that the Soviet Union—which survived seventy years, won World War II, orchestrated massive social transformation, and obliterated virtually all forms of organized opposition until Gorbachev unilaterally opened the political process—and Mexico's postrevolutionary regime (the only regime in Latin American history to survive the Great Depression, the radicalization and polarization of the 1960s and '70s, and the Debt Crisis) were relatively weak authoritarian regimes.

We do not doubt that Slater's protection-based regimes are robust, but the twentieth century has produced other durable authoritarian regimes as well. In particular, as we argue in our book and elsewhere,Footnote ⁶ parties that gain power as a result of a sustained, violent, and ideationally driven struggle frequently serve as the basis for authoritarian regimes with highly cohesive ruling elites. Indeed, many of the most strikingly robust authoritarian regimes in the contemporary period emerged out of violent revolutionary or liberation struggles: these include China, Cuba, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iran, Laos, North Korea, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. Many survived despite large-scale international pressure and/or severe economic crisis after the end of the Cold War. Hence, they can hardly be described as untested. Slater suggests that the strength of revolutionary regimes is “overblown if not illusory” and that they “are far more prone and vulnerable to internal fragmentation and factionalism” than protection regimes (p. 288). Yet we see little evidence that revolutionary regimes are less cohesive than protection regimes. In fact, what distinguishes revolutionary regimes is their capacity to remain cohesive even in the face of severe crisis. For example, in China in 1989, a group of party “elders” drawn from the revolutionary period were critical in preserving elite unity necessary to crack down on hundreds of thousands of protestors who challenged the regime.Footnote ⁷ Similarly, in Zimbabwe, the ruling ZANU-PF maintained near-complete unity during the 2000s in the face of a well-organized opposition and unprecedented economic collapse.

The importance of revolutionary origins may be seen in the contrasting fates of authoritarian regimes in contemporary Egypt and Iran. Although the absence of a ruling party in Iran facilitated division among political elites, the regime's revolutionary heritage ensured the loyalty of a powerful and ideologically motivated coercive apparatus that was able to put down a serious opposition challenge in 2009. By contrast, Mubarak's regime, which lacked such a heritage and relied more exclusively on patronage, was unable to maintain the support of the coercive agencies. Consequently, the regime collapsed in the face of a large—but arguably less organized—opposition movement in 2011.

It may be the case, then, that both successful revolution and counterrevolutionary protection pacts provide the bases for durable authoritarianism. Although the means by which they do so may differ in important ways, it is worth thinking more generally about how and when violent conflict can generate regime stability.

These are minor quibbles, however. Ordering Power is an extraordinarily compelling book. Slater's study will change our understanding of both the state-building process and the sources of authoritarian durability in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Our own study was heavily influenced by it, as many others surely will be in the future.