Vietnam's National Assembly (NA), the country's legislature, is constitutionally “the highest organ of state power in Vietnam.” However, there have been few in-depth studies of the role of the NA in Vietnam's political system or how it differs from its peers in other authoritarian states. Paul Schuler's United Front: Projecting Solidarity through Deliberation in Vietnam's Single-Party Legislature is therefore a welcome addition to the literature on the role of legislatures in nondemocracies in general and in Vietnam's political system in particular.

United Front challenges the revisionist view that the role of legislatures in single-party systems is to improve policy performance by constraining autocrats or by providing information to policy-making circles. The book instead argues that the main purpose of these legislatures is to “signal authoritarian dominance” and contribute to the “legitimacy” of the ruling regime (p. 6). Schuler tries to validate this argument through a thorough examination of the Vietnamese NA, which he believes to be an important and relevant case study, especially given that the NA has become increasingly active and “assertive” over the past three decades despite the dominance of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) over the country's political system.

The book starts with a general discussion of existing explanations for the role of authoritarian representative institutions, including co-opting opponents of the ruling regime, providing power-sharing or rent distribution arrangements, serving as a channel for citizens to provide feedback on government policies, helping to “rationalize” lawmaking, and signaling, whereby elections help the regime “deliver a message of dominance” (p. 23). While acknowledging that legislatures under single-party rule “may simultaneously serve different goals at the same time as different actors take advantage of them to serve different agendas” (p. 26), Schuler argues that in the Vietnamese context, signaling is the most important function of the NA, while the other functions are either irrelevant or insignificant.

In the subsequent chapters, the book explains how elections work in Vietnam (chapter 2), the legislative organization in the NA (chapter 3), its evolution (chapter 4), voting behavior in Vietnamese elections (chapter 5), the NA's oversight behavior (chapter 6), and the signaling value of the NA (chapter 7). These chapters provide deep and well-informed analyses of the topics in question, supported by relevant theoretical discussions and rich data collected from different surveys, including an online one with 473 respondents in May 2019, which Schuler uses to validate his hypothesis about the signaling value of the NA. By analyzing responses to the survey, Schuler concludes that general exposure to the NA increases the view that the NA is “a legitimate, competitively elected, and meaningful body,” which, in his view, is “consistent with a soft propaganda signaling effect of authoritarian institutions, whereby exposure convinces the audience of the message the regime intends to send” (p. 188).

Schuler intentionally organizes the book “in such a way that while it can be read in order, those who are interested in certain portions can skip to chapters that most interest them” (p. 13). This is a useful approach that helps readers get what they want without having to read the whole book. However, this may also have contributed to a major issue with the book, which is the lack of coherence among the chapters around the key argument that Schuler wants to advance. While chapters 2–6 provide useful background information about the NA, they contribute little to Schuler's overall argument that the NA's main function is to help the CPV “deliver a message of dominance” to the Vietnamese public. The discussion and validation of this argument are largely limited to the introductory chapter, chapter 7, and the concluding chapter. If these chapters had been repackaged as a political science journal article, that would leave ample room for Schuler to develop a monograph that is lighter in theoretical discussion and focuses more on the other interesting aspects of the NA as presented in the remaining chapters.

Indeed, this reader finds the most interesting chapter of the book to be chapter 6, in which Schuler contends that the NA's increasing assertiveness results from a desire by the CPV “to challenge and check the government.” Although this argument has little to do with the main argument of the book, it provides insights into a major feature of Vietnamese politics that has kept Vietnam's political system stable and somewhat more pluralistic than China's. Running a one-party system that lacks the democratic procedures and the checks and balances found in liberal democracies, the CPV has been innovative in empowering the NA as a measure not only to strengthen its democratic credentials but also to maintain an effective check on the power of the government, especially through the strengthened oversight function of the NA. Measures such as televised question-and-answer sessions and confidence votes on key officeholders are also useful for the CPV to hold government officials accountable, fight corruption, and promote good governance. These efforts are essential for Vietnam's socioeconomic performance and the CPV's political legitimacy and regime security in the long run, no matter how the Party's wish to “deliver a message of dominance” through the NA is perceived by the Vietnamese public.

Overall, United Front is a useful source of information and insights about the Vietnamese NA. Although it may be a heavy read for nonexpert readers because of its thick theoretical content, it is a useful resource for those who have some political science background and want to get deeper insights into the role of this increasingly important political institution of Vietnam.