Anna Grzymała-Busse has written an engaging book about the role of partisan competition in state building in nine postcommunist democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. The central puzzle that she addresses is the following: Why were some postcommunist countries better at state building—that is, setting up institutional constraints to limit state exploitation for private gain—than others? After all, as the book convincingly argues, the collapse of communism created ample opportunities for political parties in the region to gain private benefits from state assets. That parties would want to gain from those assets was inevitable because their survival depended on it. As the author argues, the generally high level of commitment to democracy and low level of party organizational resources that all parties in the region faced limited the types of resource extraction from the state that these parties could pursue: The former prevented the use of state fusion and predation, while the latter complicated the use of clientelism, leaving opportunistic state reconstruction or state exploitation as the only viable strategy of survival. Yet some parties chose to constrain their ability to use this strategy.

Grzymała-Busse solves this puzzle by pointing out that the critical variable that generates incentives for parties in power to constrain their own and other parties' ability to gain private benefits from state assets is “robust competition.” The latter is defined as “opposition parties that offer a clear, plausible, and critical governing alternative that threatens the governing coalition with replacement” (p. 1). In countries where party competition is structured around clearly identifiable opposing camps (defined by the existence of a reinvented Communist Party), where there are several plausible governing alternatives (i.e., few or no ostracized parliamentary parties), and where opposition parties offer active and vocal criticism (defined as the average annual number of parliamentary questions per member of Parliament), the government parties feel a credible threat of being monitored and possibly replaced. This threat compels governing parties to moderate their own rent-seeking behavior and to build institutional constraints that limit the ability of future governing parties to extract state resources.

On the basis of three indicators of robust competition, Grzymała-Busse identifies five countries where parties faced such competition throughout the transition period—Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Slovenia—and four countries where they did not—Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Latvia, and Slovakia. The level of robust competition in these countries is highly correlated with the level of exploitation measured as 1) the absence of formal state oversight institutions, 2) discretionary expansion of state administration, and 3) the absence of party funding rules. The causal linkage is explored in depth in Chapters 3–5, which test the relationship between robust competition and each of the three indicators of state exploitation with an impressive wealth of information presented in the form of paired comparisons of countries from the two groups as well as exposition of systematic patterns within both groups. Furthermore, the author is also careful in accounting for potential alternative explanations: Both economic and democratic development—the usual suspects—are not sufficient to account for the variance in state exploitation across the nine countries. She also explains how functional demands, communist regime legacies, the timing of state development, and elite collision are not able to account for the revealed pattern. In sum, robust competition provides a clear, theoretically sound, and appealing solution to the puzzle of differential exploitation.

The book has several strengths. First, it explores a theoretically important but often neglected question of postcommunist state development and does so from a novel perspective—that of party politics. The study, therefore, has a broad theoretical and practical appeal and should be of interest to scholars and policymakers not only of the postcommunist region but also of all developing democracies.

Second, the book is notable for the rigorous research design employed, and the creative use of quantitative, comparative, and case study methods. Furthermore, Grzymała-Busse has ploughed through an impressive amount of information to build and defend her central argument. Several other aspects of the design and presentation are commendable: the author's ability to present a complex argument in a straightforward manner, her attempt to systematically define and measure multifaceted concepts such as state exploitation and robust competition, and her forthright confrontation of competing explanations. In its design and presentation, the book serves as an excellent choice for any student or scholar looking for a model of comparative research.

In addition to these strengths, however, the book also has a few weaknesses. First of all, the clustering of the countries into “successful” versus “unsuccessful” cases is, in my opinion, not its strongest feature. The argument linking robust party competition with successful state building would have lost little, if anything, without drawing such a strong line. A good example of why such a line drawing could distract the reader from the main argument comes from a table on page 87 (“Timeline of Formal Institutional Reforms and Introductions”). In that table, two clear clusters seemingly emerge: those countries where formal institutional reforms were adopted from 1990 to 1997, and those where reforms were adopted in 1998–2002 or later. However, a closer inspection reveals that the clusters represent predictions, and that the actual picture is a little more varied (the institutional reforms being spread out a little more evenly). Moreover, the actual picture is even more complicated, since the author has classified a number of early institutional reforms in “unsuccessful” countries as insignificant, due to the arguably politicized and/or limited institutions that emerged from the reform. At the same time, only one institution in the “successful” countries, the Polish civil service, was similarly limited. I do not believe that any of the institutions in postcommunist countries could be considered as strictly politicized or not—there has always been a sliding scale of politicization in those institutions, both within as well as between countries. By making the argument that there were successful and unsuccessful countries, the author presents evidence that sometimes seems selected to fit that dichotomy, disregarding a more nuanced reality.

Even though the research is generally exemplary, there are some problems with coding. I believe that these issues only illustrate the difficulty of gathering data about postcommunist democracies from the early to mid-1990s. Since I am a little more familiar with Estonia, I could identify several minor inaccuracies or questionable judgments in coding institutional reforms in that country (p. 101). First, Grzymała-Busse claims that the Estonian civil service was apolitical and extensive from 1995. However, discussions about the politicization of civil service never disappeared from political discourse, with both opposition parties and neutral observers constantly protesting against the extent of political influence in dispensing civil service jobs (or, alternatively, the extent to which civil servants were pressured to enter the party in power). Second, the book is correct that the position of Chancellor of Judiciary was established in 1993. However, it did not have any ombudsman functions until 1999, when its powers were redefined. Finally, two dates are inaccurate: The State Audit Office was created in 1990 instead of 1995, and the first anticorruption act was adopted in 1995 instead of 1999. Similar issues arise when looking at party funding (p. 184): For example, contrary to the information in the table, the Estonian National Audit Office does not have, nor has ever had, any authority to audit political parties. Grzymała-Busse herself points out particularly well the limits of comparing the state-administration employment figures (Appendix B). To be sure, none of these data limits, inaccuracies, or arguably questionable coding decisions undermine the basic arguments and conclusions of the book. However, they do question the validity of clustering postcommunist countries into two distinct groups, and warn about the need to go far beyond the official figures and legislative texts in making assessments of the situation on the ground.

In conclusion, Rebuilding Leviathan is a notable contribution to the study of postcommunist politics, state building, and party politics. Scholars of these fields will find it an interesting and intriguing read, and graduate students will learn a lot from this book, not only about these topics but also about comparative design and method.