Despite a backdrop of economic, social and political crisis, Robert Mugabe and his ruling ZANU-PF party won the 2013 elections in Zimbabwe. The outcome left the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) battered and in disarray as election post-mortems predictably led to recriminations and another split in the party. How did it happen? Was this another instance of Mugabe and ZANU-PF stealing an election through what some in the opposition claimed was a potent combination involving a sketchy voters’ roll with 100,000 centenarians, ‘assisting’ voters, turning away over 300,000 voters, bussing people into key races, and intimidation, though with less overt violence? Or, did the wily politician win the election fairly, as ZANU-PF claimed and as was accepted, with misgivings, by observer teams from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union?

In this rich and engaging analysis, Stephen Chan and Julia Gallagher challenge these simple rigging claims, suggesting instead that Mugabe and ZANU-PF won credibly, aided by some ‘judicious rigging’ and a healthy helping of ineptness on the part of Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC. Chan and Gallagher point to several conditions – the legacies of colonialism; memories of the economic collapse of 2007–08 and the horrific election violence of 2008; Mugabe's continued towering presence in Zimbabwean politics; Tsvangirai's heroic, if flawed, challenge to Mugabe; and an evolving state–society relationship marked by simultaneously hopeful and ambivalent political attitudes – as critical in shaping the outcome of the 2013 elections.

In addition to all of these conditions and factors, a key claim in this book is that going into the 2013 elections the MDC ran a haphazard campaign. For Chan and Gallagher, the MDC was weakened during the coalition government. To begin with, participation in the coalition undermined the MDC's most potent argument, one ‘rooted in the idea of its differences from ZANU-PF, one of which was the idea of probity in government’ (p. 57). Second, key members and resources of the MDC were directed towards participation in the coalition government, resulting in fractured and weak party structures. As a consequence, the party lost discipline and capacity, both of which affected its campaign and ability to connect with voters in the 2013 elections.

While the MDC seemed to have been destabilized and decentred by participation in the coalition government, Chan and Gallagher contend that ZANU-PF took advantage of the Government of National Unity (GNU) to reconnect with its supporters. Bound and united by the ideological construct of ‘patriotic history’, they suggest that ZANU-PF fashioned a campaign that strengthened its grass-roots party structures among the rural populace and offered middle-class voters, long core supporters of the MDC, the possibility of material gains through its indigenization programme. The outcome of this effort was that ZANU-PF ran a ‘professional and committed campaign that involved a substantial voter registration drive, effective party mobilisation and a carefully crafted re-seduction of the Zimbabwean electorate’ (p. 71). Little wonder then that Freedom House survey results of voter intentions in 2012 pointed to real gains in support of ZANU, survey results that, curiously, the unfocused MDC discounted.

Along the way, Chan and Gallagher assert that they augment structuralist accounts of ZANU-PF success in elections, which emphasize Mugabe's control of patronage and the security apparatus. While recognizing the ways in which offering patronage has helped to tie people to ZANU-PF and violence has petrified others into voting for ZANU-PF or not voting at all, in this book Chan and Gallagher seem to rely much more on what they call a ‘culturalist’ approach. This approach, they contend, takes seriously ‘the ways in which power is produced through [the] imagination’ of the governed (p. 11). According to Chan and Gallagher, what we learn by considering how Zimbabweans imagined state power leading up to the 2013 elections that we would not otherwise see is that a significant proportion of citizens voted for Mugabe in part because they: (1) interpreted some of his actions as the ‘disciplining’ role of the father-president; and (2) ‘Tsvangirai … had ceased to be a thinkable president in 2013’ (p. 14).

Despite the book's very important corrections regarding the 2013 elections, it is likely that as many scholars will be frustrated by Why Mugabe Won as will find it compelling. Firstly, one problem with the book is that it points to too many conditions (arguments) as central to the outcome. While each is plausible, few are fully developed, fleshed out or supported robustly. Specifically, the direct link between all of the conditions they point to, including their argument about how Zimbabweans understood power, and individual voting behaviour is never really made persuasively enough.

Furthermore, when we consider for a moment the ‘imagining a president’ culturalist argument summarized above, the reason for Mugabe's victory is not obvious as both he and Tsvangirai were highly flawed candidates. In my reading of the book, it looks more likely that they relied on the patronage argument summarized above. Chan and Gallagher actually concede its importance in noting that ‘the incentive for an aspirational voter was to join ZANU-PF and benefit from an indigenisation brought from the countryside to the cities’ (p. 36). If Zimbabweans were motivated to vote for ZANU-PF and Mugabe because of the ‘goodies’ they stood to gain, we might not need a complex narrative about which figure seemed more presidential.

These quibbles notwithstanding, Why Mugabe Won is a worthy read. It rightly questions simple ‘rigging’ explanations and offers a broad range of factors behind Mugabe's 2013 electoral success. Chan and Gallagher have produced a thought-provoking addition to the growing scholarship on the 2013 elections. Why Mugabe Won will also be of particular interest after Mugabe's removal. In fact, the book seems to anticipate this fate in suggesting that ‘the 2013 elections were won by Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF, but they were also elections that led to everything he and his party once stood for facing a total eclipse by the time of the next elections in 2018’ (p. 178).