In the past decade, the literature on autocratic institutions has increased dramatically. One of its key findings is that autocracies with political parties are better situated to manage both elites and voters and thus last longer, on average, than other forms of authoritarianism. Yet despite much work on this topic, most studies assume that all autocratic parties are created equal and are uniformly equipped to generate stability. In How Autocrats Compete, Yonatan Morse demonstrates deep flaws in this assumption. The core argument of the book is that only electoral autocracies with credible ruling parties enjoy the benefits of routinized elite management and voter loyalty. However, the majority of autocratic ruling parties lack credibility and thus face far more contingent circumstances. They depend more heavily on repression and coercion and are more reliant on international support to stay in power. Morse explores this argument with secondary sources, archival materials, elite interviews, and within-country quantitative analysis in three key cases: Tanzania, Cameroon, and Kenya. As opposed to large-N, cross-national work on ruling parties, How Autocrats Compete offers a rich, in-depth analysis of the inner workings of three extremely different regimes.

The key contribution of the book is to break open the concept of the “autocratic ruling party” and provide a conceptual measure for the credibility of such parties. A party’s credibility is measured by its physical size, decisional autonomy, internal democracy, and the breadth of its social commitments (p. 39). When we consider these factors, it becomes apparent that, historically, credible ruling parties are actually quite rare, despite what broader theories of authoritarianism might lead us to believe. The author then shows how these different aspects of credibility produce institutions capable of managing elite competition, mobilizing electoral support, and weakening the opposition. The ruling party in Tanzania, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), offers the classic example of a credible party. The Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM) and the Kenyan African National Union, despite equally long histories as the CCM, lack credibility, acting primarily on the personal authority of the executive branch.

Using rich historical detail, chapter 4 describes the roots of these three parties from the independence era through the transition to multiparty politics. The author masterfully synthesizes a dense history of three political parties into a convincing narrative about the extent to which each one has been capable of producing credibility over the course of three decades. Using a trove of secondary sources, chapter 5 traces the process whereby party credibility—especially decisional autonomy and internal democracy—produces elites who are loyal to the party. In the era of multiparty politics, elite defection is highest in Kenya, which features the least credible ruling party, whereas it is lowest in Tanzania where elites can depend on independently enforced rules to provide credible mechanisms for career management.

Chapter 6 demonstrates how party credibility also produces voter loyalty, especially through its breadth of social commitments. Whereas in Tanzania the delivery of public resources is largely perceived as fairly distributed, in Cameroon and Kenya there are widespread perceptions that these social services are ethnically contingent, which undermines voter loyalty to the party. The author argues that in Tanzania, areas with higher levels of “social incorporation” are more likely to support the CCM in the multiparty era, showing that ujamaa villages from 1973 to 1975 are correlated with higher vote shares for the CCM, on average, during the multiparty era. However, the author never defines what he means by social incorporation, the key independent variable of this chapter, and he could do much more to explain how these specific ujamaa villages feature higher levels of it. In contrast, he argues that vote share for the ruling parties in Cameroon and Kenya follow ethnic patterns. However, the pooled nature of the data belies some important variation that undermines this argument. For example, Morse contends that the CPDM garners its electoral support primarily from the south and center regions, which, although accurate for the founding multiparty election, has not been true since 1992. In the following nonboycotted presidential election in 2004, Paul Biya received similar vote shares in the south (97%) and center (87%) as he did in Adamawa (88%), the east (92%), the far north (85%), and the north (85%). Overall, chapter 6 is arguably the weakest chapter, perhaps because the author relies heavily on (admittedly) precarious quantitative indicators to make his argument. Although the elite interviews do shed light on some aspects of party campaign strategies, the argument may have been made more forcefully with qualitative data from actual voters. For a chapter about voter support, the voters themselves appear quite absent from the story.

Chapter 7 introduces the international component of the argument, demonstrating the critical role that international patrons can play in tipping the balance of electoral turnover in autocracies that lack a credible ruling party. Where the party is sound, such as in Tanzania, international influence has little impact on subsequent events. However, where the party is more feeble, such influence can play a pivotal role. When the regime in Cameroon faced a serious crisis in the early 1990s, the French continued providing the government with critical financial assistance without conditions. In Kenya, by contrast, the regime was far more constrained because the international community used aid conditionality, democracy assistance, and diplomatic pressure to weaken the autocratic party’s ability to use repression.

Overall, How Autocrats Compete offers a superb analysis of three disparate ruling parties and the ways in which they have managed to remain in power (or not) over the course of a half-century. The author marshals an impressive amount of qualitative data to illustrate his core arguments. However, one of the key issues left unresolved—of which the author is keenly aware—is why some regimes develop credible parties in the first place. Chapter 4 provides some interesting anecdotal explanations for the three cases, such as the salience of ethnicity, colonial legacies, and reliance on the military, but these dynamics never coalesce into a unified theory. This is problematic because many of the factors that may have prevented credible parties from forming in Cameroon and Kenya may also explain the outcomes the author is interested in. As just one example, it seems quite clear that Tanzania’s unique history of unusually low ethnic salience had a key role to play in the ability of the CCM to establish its credibility; yet it is precisely this lack of ethnic salience that has enabled the government to appear less ethnically biased in its provision of public services. In addition, there is sometimes confusion as to the sequencing of the causal mechanisms at the core of the theory. The argument contends that party credibility comes first, causing elite and voter loyalty. But it seems that this process is necessarily recursive, as elite and voter loyalty must in turn also deepen party credibility. The author does not address the nature of this circularity.

Nonetheless, despite these concerns, Yonatan Morse’s book is a must read for anyone interested in autocratic institutions or African political parties. It is a welcome qualitative analysis of autocratic parties that offers an in-depth look at opaque organizations that nonetheless have had profound impacts on the political trajectories of the regimes they serve.