In the 1990s, Yoweri Museveni was one of Africa's ‘new generation of leaders’. Part of that cohort of younger men meant to bring a new sort of politics to the continent; a politics meant to be more liberal and democratic. Museveni now belongs to the older generation. At the time of writing he has been in office for twenty-three years. For the majority of Ugandans Museveni is the only president they have known. Uganda's experiments in decentralisation, universal primary education and HIV/AIDS campaigning have been much admired and emulated across the continent; and he has been a darling of Western donors and development agencies. A harder sell has been the ‘no-party democracy’ introduced to the country in the late 1980s.

‘No-party democracy’ is the subject of a new book by Giovanni Carbone. A democratic system based on the ‘individual merit principle’, no-party democracy involves candidates standing for election based on their qualities as individuals rather than as representatives of a party with a manifesto. From the late 1980s up to the start of 2006 – when a competitive party politics was reintroduced – this was Uganda's formal political system. It was a somewhat totalitarian approach, which many scholars have understood as a response to Uganda's ethnic, religious and regional divisions. No-Party Democracy: Ugandan politics in comparative perspective is also a detailed and nuanced account of Uganda's politics more generally over the past twenty years.

Three audiences will be interested in the book: democratic theorists, comparative politics people, and those interested in politics and development in Africa. For the democratic theorists, there is an example of a detailed and nuanced case study analysis, one which relates a democratic model to an evolving political situation. For the comparative politics person, there is a reflection on Uganda as an example of a weakened political system managing the stresses of democratisation and liberalisation. For the Africa specialist there is an original and important critique of Uganda under Museveni. The story of the book is of how the model of ‘no-party democracy’ became untenable over the medium term.

That Carbone does such a good job of speaking to each audience in no way detracts from the coherence of the book as a whole. The author relates the specifics of the case to theoretical debates and comparable examples. This also means that the narrative is a much more reflective, careful and considered account than is usual, and Carbone does not reduce the story of Uganda to the biography of its president. Middle sections of the book deal with the different actors involved in Ugandan politics: Museveni; the National Resistance Movement; the old political parties. Before the conclusion there is an excursus into what ‘no-party’ democracy meant to electoral politics and parliament.

In each of these chapters there are new insights; of particular interest is Carbone's analysis of the old political parties which were allowed to struggle on, in non-electoral form, throughout the ‘no-party’ system. By the end of the book the reader has something much more comprehensive and overarching than a simple analysis of a democratic model. There is, at present, no better overview of Uganda's politics under Museveni and no better account of the way that that politics has been shaped by Uganda's political past. Sufficient attention is paid to the actions and strategies of individuals, but there is something fairly structural to an analysis in which current developments appear as variations on past themes. Carbone draws on the relatively strong political science literature of Brett, Mamdani and Young. He also offers a fairly comprehensive synthesis of recent writing by Ugandan scholars such as Tripp, Oloka-Onyango and Kasfir.

Carbone is also inspired by the work of Giovanna Sartori and Arend Lijphardt, and it is to this thoughtful tradition of comparative politics that No-Party Politics belongs. The writing style is on the dry side, and if there is one criticism it is that in synthesising so much, and in being so careful in handling a fairly contradictory and patchy literature, the author's own line of argument is not always clear. This is perhaps a consequence of giving space to the fate of political parties, parliamentary debate, and those on the margins of the ruling class, subjects which are relatively underdeveloped in the literature, meaning that Carbone has to explain a lot to get his analysis across to the reader. The conclusion, by contrast, is a model in this regard, and is both critical and thought-provoking.

No-Party Democracy is thus an informative read, but it is also a depressing book. Within the thoughtful and carefully weighted analysis there is also a profound statement about how poorly Ugandans are served by their political system. Less seems to have changed over the twenty-three years that is sometimes imagined. The weak authoritarianism of the state, the politics of ethnicity, the narrowing of the ruling elite, the inability to move power away from the army, the poverty of the rural economy, and the perverse effects of donor agencies and Western governments, all continue to describe and define Uganda's politics. No-Party Democracy is less about the shortcomings of a democratic model than the story of a society that continues to be very distant from its political class. Behind the fanfare for the new generation, the mood music seems to be very much the same.