Although Miriam R. Lowi's primary goal is to explain “the enigma of Algeria” (p. 16), her analysis extends far beyond this individual country to shed light on questions that are of broad interest to students of comparative politics. Indeed, as is indicative of all so-called single-country case studies, her in-depth investigation of Algeria's postindependence trajectory—from its “unfulfilled expectations” in the 1980s to its “descent into violence” in the 1990s and then “the [state's] resurgence” in the 2000s (p. 7)—is at the outset an attempt to explain a larger class of phenomena.Footnote ¹ Lowi is quite explicit in this regard. In sum, she seeks to “extend [her] argument about Algeria” to explain, first, why oil-rich states experience different kinds of political stability in the face of similar economic shocks, and second, what role, if any, oil wealth has played in fueling these political outcomes (p. 17).

These are ambitious goals in what is a marvelously rich book. And when it comes to the first, they are mostly realized. Concerning the second, however, the book falls short. This is not only because Lowi's research design prohibits us from isolating the causal impact of oil itself, but also because the argument she puts forth suggests that there is nothing special about regimes in oil-rich states when it comes to preserving stability. Oil Wealth and the Poverty of Politics is thus both a testament to the immense value of case study research for comparative analysis and a reminder of its limitations.

Perhaps the most fundamental and yet least appreciated contribution of case study research is its ability to define new outcomes of interest and, thus, generate new puzzles worthy of inquiry.Footnote ² It can accomplish this in a variety of ways: by enabling us to investigate “rare events” that nonetheless have broad implications (e.g., revolutions), identifying a new outcome (e.g., the developmental state), or reconceptualizing the outcome we seek to explain (e.g., regime change rather than democratization).

Miriam R. Lowi's intensive study of Algeria is exemplary of all three ways. First, her detailed knowledge of this single case alerts us to the fact that Algeria's experience is fairly unique in comparison to other oil-rich states. Whereas regimes in most oil-exporting countries seem to have either maintained political stability or collapsed in the aftermath of oil shocks in 1977 and 1986 (for details, see Smith Reference Smith2007), Lowi describes Algeria's experience as falling somewhere in between these two extremes. Although the regime encountered intense political turmoil in the late 1980s and 1990s with Chadli Benjedid at the helm (Chapter 5), it was nonetheless able to restabilize and recover its hegemony in the 2000s under Abdelaziz Bouteflika (Chapter 6). She thus eschews the usual dichotomies of political stability versus instability and regime persistence versus collapse and recasts the outcome to be explained as a trio of possibilities that range from “instability and [regime] breakdown” to “instability followed by re-equilibration” to “regime continuity without a major crisis” (pp. 7–8). The core empirical puzzle to be explained, then, is not simply why some regimes collapsed while other survived but, rather, why “in some, contentious politics on the heels of economic crisis provoked regime collapse, while in others it did not, and in still others, states on the brink of collapse managed to re-stabilize” (p. 7). Importantly, this puzzle is not an obvious one, but instead emerges from Lowi's keen ability to reconceptualize political (in)stability based on the relative uniqueness of the Algerian case.

Conversely, the role of the case study in identifying and/or specifying causal mechanisms is among its most widely cited advantages, and yet perhaps the least understood. In particular, as others have recognized, there is a tendency to confuse mechanisms with intervening variables, and thus to minimize their unique role in linking cause and effect by illuminating how a set of inputs actually translates into an output (e.g., Mahoney Reference Mahoney2001).

Lowi's insistence that “leadership choice … is the most consequential variable in the elaboration of political outcomes” (p. 15; emphasis added) commits this error in reverse. In sum, her argument hinges upon how leaders decide to distribute scarce resources to supporters versus challengers following an exogenous economic shock. Faced with rising popular discontent, their ability to maintain political stability and remain in power depends on striking the right balance between repression and co-optation of social forces. Her argument, however, is not simply about whether leaders make the correct choice but, rather, the iterated process whereby they learn what the “right balance” is for their particular time and space (also known as sociopolitical historical context) based on past experience as well as current interactions with social forces. Leadership choice, therefore, cannot be reduced to a single act or attribute of the leader; in other words, it is not a variable but a mechanism. Moreover, learning is a cognitive mechanism that is rarely applied to leaders in oil-rich states because resource wealth is presumed to induce myopia and euphoria.

Another frequently cited benefit of case study research is that it provides more confidence that units of analysis are indeed comparable. The main reason behind this is not the small number of cases per se but the self-consciousness that small-n research imparts on scholars to specify scope conditions: that is, the inherent need to clearly articulate the larger class of bounded phenomena to which their study belongs (e.g., Ragin Reference Ragin1997).

In this regard, the merits of Lowi's comparative study are mixed. On the one hand, she explicitly limits her analysis to “a subset of oil-exporting states that share political cultural attributes—among them the Islamic religion and ‘modern’ authoritarianism” (p. 6). She then further restricts the set of relevant cases to “‘late developers’ with authoritarian-modernizing regimes and patrimonial structures” (p. 7) that embarked upon oil-based development “in a context in which the state is weakly institutionalized” and “major societal groups … are weakly incorporated into the state—insofar as they are excluded by the regime from political and economic spoils” (p. 11). This is a narrow set of cases indeed; in addition to Algeria, it includes Iran, Indonesia, pre-Gulf Iraq, and Saudi Arabia (plus Libya and Malaysia, neither of which is part of her study). Lowi's rationale is that regimes with such similar characteristics should also encounter similar kinds of crises in the aftermath of an oil-price shock, enabling her to isolate the causal effect of “leadership choice” (as described previously) on their diverse political outcomes: political instability and regime collapse in Indonesia and Iran; political instability and regime continuity in Algeria and Iraq; and political stability and regime continuity in Saudi Arabia.

On the other hand, it is questionable whether these cases are indeed comparable. First and foremost, it is not evident that their respective regimes all faced either the same type of economic shock or the same degree of political crisis following this shock. This is not merely because their levels of fiscal relianceFootnote ³ on oil differed—both from one another and during each of the oil shocks—but even more so because they relied on very different sources of legitimacy to sustain their rule. Lowi readily admits that Indonesia is an obvious outlier with regard to the former (pp. 18, 161, 171), but so too is Saudi Arabia based on the latter. Given its status as the rightful rulers of an Islamic state fortified by an historical alliance with the ulama, the Al-Sa'ud family has access to a powerful source of social control that is not dependent on economic patronage. Hence, an oil price shock alone might crack but could not dismantle the foundations of the regime.

What is clear from Lowi's rich and original analysis is that how leaders of oil-rich states respond to an economic crisis—specifically, their ability to learn from past encounters with opposition and to adapt their strategies in light of new circumstances—affects whether they can maintain stability and remain in power. And yet, the impact of oil itself is elusive. There are essentially two reasons: First, all of the cases included in her analysis are oil-rich states, precluding us from isolating the independent effect of oil; and second, the need for adaptive leadership to quell social unrest in the aftermath of an economic crisis is not unique to oil-rich states.

This may, however, be precisely what Lowi intends. Implicit in her research design is a presumption that resource wealth is neither the key distinction that should be drawn among oil-rich states nor determinative of political outcomes in oil-rich states. Her book thus not only offers a powerful counterargument to the conventional literature on the resource curse but also contributes to a growing body of literature that posits that oil is neither a curse nor a blessing but, rather, has a conditional effect on political outcomes that is mediated through actors and institutions (e.g., Dunning Reference Dunning2008).