Stephen E. Hanson offers us a two-part book, and each part is worth reading, but both raise interesting questions. Hanson wishes to explain the outcomes of transitions from imperial states through periods of uncertainty by examining the presence or absence of ideologically driven leaders, their relationship to affectively connected activists, and the growth of habitual political cultures when these relationships are sustained. Where such leaders emerge and persist, he argues, and where they can build durable organizational links between themselves and affectively connected followers, successful political transitions will result. For reasons to be outlined in the following, he does not convince me, but his book is a tour de force, with a unique combination of Weberian theory, rational choice concepts, and historical-institutional narrative.

The first half of the book, entitled, with deceptive blandness, “Conceptual and Theoretical Issues,” is written in the classical “Big Authors/Big Structures” tradition (Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, 1989). But as he builds up steam, Hanson shows that he can turn the same searchlight on more recent authors, too, ending this part of the book with vigorous analyses of the recent party system literature. The second part of the book heroically synthesizes three national transitions from empires to something else: stable democracy in the Third French Republic, unstable democracy and finally fascism in the Weimar Republic, and what he considers an unstable hybrid regime in post-Soviet Russia. The central thread holding together his three cases is the role of consistent and clear ideologies on the part of party leaders, who can thereby gain the affective affiliation of activists and voters.

In Part I, Hanson walks the reader through decades of social theory, from Marx to Weber (especially Weber) and from Durkheim and Talcott Parsons to modernization theory. At times, this reader felt as if he was back in the 1960s, when courses in comparative politics began with a survey of Our Great Predecessors. Strangely, given Hanson's embedding in The Greats, and his insistence that instrumental rationality will not take us very far in understanding unstable periods, it is odd to find the language of contemporary rational choice hovering over his book. For example, he renders the everyday idea that people who join a movement are likely to support joint efforts with other activists into “ratcho-speak”: “Once an instrumentally rational individual decides to adopt the formal, consistent definition of membership in the future polity articulated by a new ideological elite, the effect is to lower her discount rate in evaluating the future benefits from cooperation with her fellow converts” (p. 53). Sometimes, Hanson seems so intent upon convincing rationalists to take his work seriously that his fundamental critique of the limits of their perspective is obscured.

This is to cavil: For the current generation of graduate students, many of whom know far too little about The Greats and even less about their connections to current fashions, Part I will be a pedagogical feast. But there are costs to such an abundant repast. In order to package so rich a theoretical diet within a relatively slim book, Hanson resorts to another practice resonant of the 1960s: putting theorists and theories into four-cell tables. This has the virtue of allowing him to organize a lot of material parsimoniously, but it is not always fair to the theorist who finds himself squeezed into one of the cells of those tables. Although I surely do not know my Weber as well as Hanson, I felt uneasy learning that the theorist of bureaucratization can be labeled, simply, a “methodological individualist.”

Hanson sharpens his scalpel when he turns to a close analysis of how ideology has been treated in studies of party systems—it has either been reduced to insignificance or treated as a function of something else. He begins by dismissing three claims often found in the literature on party ideologies: that all leaders are ideologues and ideology is therefore a functional part of all political action (pp. 43 ff.); that ideologies cannot be defined simply as formal or consistent worldviews but must be seen in relation to the definition of the meaning of membership in a political community (p. 34); and that defining ideologies as points on a left–right continuum generalizes too much from Western European and North American politics since the French Revolution (p. 46).

Hanson has convinced me that the party system literature woefully underplays the importance of ideology, but he is less convincing when he defines ideology as “any clear and consistent definition of the criteria for membership in a desired political order” (p. 47), a definition he characterizes as “Weberian” but which sounds more identitarian than Weberian to this reader. Ideology's success, he argues, depends on “its intersection with both affectual and instrumentally rational motivations for conversion and adherence” (p. 48). Ideologically driven leaders have an advantage over pragmatic ones because they offer activists stable-seeming focal points during times of uncertainty and disorder. I say stable-seeming because I am not as certain as Hanson is that all of his ideological leaders were as consistent in their ideologies as he thinks they were. For example, while Adolf Hitler certainly had fixed ideas about who should be part of the German political order, he was ideologically inconsistent in many other ways.

More fundamentally, it is not clear why Hanson defines ideology as “any clear and consistent definition of the criteria for membership in a desired political order.” Perhaps this choice grows out of the particular contexts in which he is interested—imperial systems in conditions of uncertainty when a new political order is taking shape? But that would make this an empirical generalization, not a definition. The consequence of Hanson's choice is to exclude from the realm of ideology any belief system that is not based on the construction of exclusive identities. Purification, development, equality: None of these familiar ideological goals qualifies as ideological if we are to accept Hanson's definition of ideology. Define ideology as the criterion for membership in a desired political order, and when that order emerges, the successful leader is bound to look like an ideologue!

Chapter 3 links this identitarian definition of ideology to the relations between party leaders and followers. “Successful ideologies can also trigger affectual motivations for conversion,” he writes, “to the extent that they resonate with the strongly held prejudices and/or psychological predispositions of particular subcultures. Eventually, even instrumentally rational actors may then choose to embrace ideological definitions of their identity, if they perceive the chances for the eventual success of a new ideology to be reasonably good” (p. 77).

When will followers identify with the ideological projects of ideological leaders? Hanson is a self-confessed methodological individualist, and he reduces the causal mechanism that links ideological leadership to party success to “the elongation of the time horizons among ideological party activists” (p. 82, 78). He seems to mean that when inspired by ideological leaders who are consistent in their belief systems, activists and potential activists will associate their fates with these leaders (p. 77). But what about brokerage, organization, mobilization, polarization: the familiar processes that link leaders and followers? These relational mechanisms are pushed to the sidelines by Hanson's determined methodological individualism. (Although I have not read every page, I only found the word “mobilization” on page 246.)

The most interesting achievement of the book is Hanson's comparison of the first decade or so following the collapse of three very different imperial regimes: the French Third Republic, Weimar Germany, and post-Soviet Russia. Largely on the basis of English-language sources, and making no claim to a historian's expertise, Hanson nevertheless offers a step-by-step account of how the parties navigated the turbulent but tempting waters of the transitions in each of these three countries, through either ideological or nonideological compasses and with what medium-term results. I found this the most intriguing part of the book, not only because Hanson has a gift for synthesis of all the English-language literature he has read but also because his narratives have the feel of reality.

The author's treatment of the transition from the French Second Empire to the Third Republic, which also appears in his contribution to the important symposium on democratization in Comparative Political Studies 8/9 (August/September 2010), is both realistic and controversial. He sees Leon Gambetta, a radical republican leader before, during, and after the transition from the Second Empire, as the ideologically consistent genius of that transition. Because of his determined championing of the republic, Hanson argues, Gambetta outlasted his more pragmatic and shifting opponents. These included the monarchists, who were equally ideologically determined but were split between legitimists and Orleanists, and the liberals and Bonapartists, who lacked the ideological drive or consistency to stand up to Gambetta for long. By 1878, against many odds, the Third Republic was established as a republic, one that would last longer than any other modern French regime.

That Gambetta was a clear and consistent republican leader is not in doubt. But that his success was due to his ideological construction of France as a republican community is less clear. First, there were his opponents' profound errors—especially the Duke of Chambord, who lost his chance for the reinstatement of the Bourbons because he insisted on a legitimist flag that his potential monarchist allies loathed. Then there was Gambetta's skill as a party organizer and mobilizer, which emerges clearly from Hanson's narrative, even though he gives it little independent causal importance. Finally, there was the republicans' invention of a new and inventive state strategy—using the educational system to socialize people living in the Hexagon to the idea that France was and should be a republic. (If anything turned “peasants into French people” it was the secular schoolteacher insisting they speak French, salute the tricolor, and worship “not ancetres les gaulois”!)

Hanson then turns to the transition from the German Empire to the Weimar Republic, and from there to the Nazi dictatorship. Apart from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), who should emerge as the ideologically consistent victor in the struggle for power but Adolf Hitler, the paradigm of Hanson's definition of an ideological leader. He defined the national political community so vigorously that when he rose to power, he proceeded to liquidate every group—Jews, gypsies, Communists—who were outside his definition. French and German scholars may bristle at the pairing of Gambetta, the sober republican, with Hitler, the fanatical racist, but Hanson is not really interested in the personalities of these leaders but in the role of ideology in their success.

No serious scholar of Nazism or biographer would disagree fundamentally with his characterization of Hitler as a leader with a “clear and consistent definition of the criteria for membership in a desired political order,” but that depends upon our accepting Hanson's idiosyncratic definition of ideology. For one thing, Hitler was politically extremely flexible, tacking to left and right to pick up support, on one side, from distraught workers and pensioners, and on the other, from businessmen and Junker aristocrats. Second, he had no economic philosophy to speak of, as the author readily admits (p. 149). But most important, Hitler won because of strategic flexibility, tactical ruthlessness, and the divisions and self-destructive strategies of the other actors—not to mention the institutional framework of the Weimar constitution. Hanson is, of course, aware of these factors and weaves them into his story, but his ideological master variable leaves them in the shadows.

Hanson hits his stride when he turns to the case he knows well, and perhaps the one that fostered his definition of ideology: post-Soviet Russia, leading to the “nonideological” regime of Vladimir Putin. He argues that while the fates of Third Republic France and Weimar Germany can be read around the ideological power and consistency of leaders like Gambetta and Hitler, and their talents in attracting the affective support of French and German activists, the contemporary politics of Russia can best be understood in the light of the absence of such an ideology and the failure to align supporters around an ideological project. In fact, he argues, the “party” that Putin represents was state created, and to the extent that it mobilizes supporters, it does so through the widespread allocation of state patronage.

I do not claim expertise about the former Soviet Union, but I detect some problems with Hanson's analysis. First, while he credits two post-1989 parties—the Russian Communists (CPRF) and Vladimir Zhirinovsky's “liberals” (LDPR) with coherent ideologies, the first made tactical compromises with the Kremlin and the second was increasingly willing to trade its Duma votes and seats for cash at crucial turning points (p. 230). This strikes me as a classic case of saving the hypothesis: both Gambetta and Hitler—Hanson's ideologically consistent and successful leaders—did plenty of horse trading to achieve and hold onto power, too.

Second, while it is certainly true that Putin's rise to power was not the outcome of an ideologically consistent campaign, that seems to me to undermine, rather than support, Hanson's model. Unless we assume that Putin's decade-long supremacy was not a success, or that there has been no true transition in Russian politics—a view that some skeptics would take—his rise to power and capacity to hold onto it for over a decade seems to me to suggest that there are royal roads to power in postimperial systems other than the determined, ideologically consistent mobilization of activists and mass publics around an inspired ideological leader.

Hanson closes his rich and variegated book with a chapter called, predictably, “Bringing Ideology Back In” (pp. 237–54). This chapter both makes a bold claim for the importance of ideology in solving the collective-action problems of countries undergoing uncertain transitions and goes beyond that claim to attack rational choice theory as too closely tied to assumptions of instrumental rationality to attend sufficiently to value-rational motives, charismatic authority, and the force of habit that sets in after leaders are established in power. As the book winds down, he adds a number of “of course” statements to his ideological master variable, rejecting some alternative explanations and turning others into complementary mechanisms.

This is all de bonne guerre, but why should factors such as “the broader social environment generated by the interests of the military and the police, key economic elites, international actors and social movements from below” only appear on page 229 of this rich and detailed book? Have we not gone beyond the kind of social science that “brings back” or “brings in” a master variable and then qualifies it by the author's recognition of “other factors”? Would a more rigorous approach not have specified these variables at the outset and attempted to understand their interactions with ideological consistency as the cases examined were unrolled? Let us hope that rather than a sequence of “bringing back” responses to Hanson's challenge, his book will encourage the next generation of scholars of democratization to engage in a truly multivariate and interactive account of how empires turn into something else.