Why is Turkey the democratic exception in the Middle East? This is Michele Penner Angrist's research question, even though her broader claim is “that regime outcomes in the region can be understood most systematically … as the product of the features of indigenous party system characteristics at a specific point in time” (p. 188). The volume contains a comparative study on the development of party systems in the Middle East, discussing Turkey and eight other cases (Syria, Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, South Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran). By doing so, Angrist contributes to at least three strands of literature: studies on political parties and party systems in the Middle East, literature on nation building, and research on Middle Eastern democratization and the resilience of authoritarianism. She “treats party system characteristics as a dependent variable” (p. 19) that results from colonial powers' politics vis-à-vis traditional local elites and from constellations of power within societies (Part I). She also treats the party system as an independent variable that—according to the author—is “pivotal for founding regime outcomes” (p. 19; in the second half of the book). Class, levels of socioeconomic development, and culture and/or religion are consequently rejected as explanations for Arab authoritarianism and Turkish democracy.

Angrist finds three patterns of party system evolution: single, preponderant, mass-mobilizing parties in South Yemen, Algeria, and Tunisia; polarized multi-party systems after independence in Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt; and bi-partyism with different successive challenger parties but little polarization in Turkey. Two further crucial variables in shaping regimes, she argues, are a) whether or not political forces are polarized and b) whether or not there is what she calls “mobilizational asymmetry” in the regimes' founding phase (inequality between incumbents and challengers in terms of resources and capacities to mobilize support for their respective parties). Part II of the volume is devoted to linking these patterns of party system characteristics to regime outcomes: Preponderant single parties lead to immediate authoritarianism, polarized multiparty systems with mobilizational asymmetry result in delayed authoritarian rule, and only the depolarized Turkish bi-party system with “increased mobilizational symmetry” triggered a competitive political regime.

More could be said about the details of Angrist's theoretical argument, but four overarching issues deserve discussion. First, her focus on parties for regime outcomes may be questioned. Angrist does not discuss what the absence of parties (as in several Gulf monarchies) means for regime type. If specific party system features were pivotal for authoritarian regime outcomes (i.e., for all cases except Turkey), then how are those cases to be explained where the outcome is similar, but parties do not even exist? Also, other possible explanatory variables are dismissed all too quickly as unsatisfying (Chap. 1 and Conclusions). While she admits that class analysis is a useful complement to studying political parties in order to make “general statements about the conditions under which, and as a result of whose agency, democratic institutions will emerge” (p. 11), class undoubtedly is a key underlying factor for party system formation. But I suspect that politically relevant constellations of power in a wider sense may be the variable Angrist really tries to capture when focusing on political party systems. Yet, parties are but one among other possible manifestations of power constellations, and are therefore not sufficient to explain regime formation (let alone regime survival).

A second point concerns the level of generalization that Angrist's argument allows. The key variables are stringently developed and examined, but in order to ascertain the validity of the argument for comparative politics, cases outside the Middle East would necessarily have to be taken into account. Possibilities of conceptual travel seem restricted by the fact that the argument is overly complex, and ad hoc variables are invoked that are either very specific to the cases examined or have been dismissed as not satisfying in the conceptual outline (e.g., p. 189: “polarization and mobilizational asymmetry are central variables that, holding constant all other pertinent factors (such as the external environment, wealth levels in society, and political culture), should render the survival of nascent democratic bargains problematic” [emphasis added]. While the volume is empirically rich, parsimony and theoretical elegance do not figure among its strengths.

The third and fourth questions concern what exactly the book explains. The third relates to time, the fourth to space: Although there are brief efforts at demonstrating topicality in a subsection on “Reflexions on Contemporary U.S. Policy in the Region” (pp. 194–97), the book is clearly more a contribution to twentieth-century history than to the analysis of current politics in the Middle East. This does not make it any less interesting, but it is necessary to note the fact. Fourth, the cross-country comparison has an exceptionally high number of cases for qualitative work, but as becomes apparent, what actually interests Angrist is Turkish democracy. Although part of the political science audience will doubt whether Turkey from 1950 onwards is correctly classified as “democratic” (at least when taking common definitions of democracy as a yardstick), the study is convincing both empirically and theoretically for Turkey and the formation of its competitive regime. Yet, the explanatory power of the argument for authoritarian regimes in the Arab cases is limited. The theoretical literature on democratization on which the research is based (“transitology” of various shades, from actor-centered to macrostructuralist) might just not contain sufficient ingredients to explain the “nonevent” (“nondemocratization”). Variables that figure prominently in the recent literature on Arab authoritarianism (rentierism, patrimonial sociopolitical structures, regimes' manipulation of oppositions, different modes of formal and informal political contestation, changing nature of regimes, recent elite dynamics, and so forth) are hardly discussed. At least the second part of the book thus explains the region's exceptional case, but not the rule, and the explanation of the one exception cannot be reversed into an ex negativo explanation of the many “normal” cases. In this respect, the book differs from the current comparative literature on regimes, and I am not sure whether the reader is well informed by Reşat Kasaba's blurb on the back cover that suggests that “we have here a volume that tackles the subject [Middle East democracy and democratization] head on”—what is tackled is the very specific Turkish case of democratization—and this happens to be the only one in the region.

Despite these issues, Angrist's Part I represents a valuable contribution on political parties and party system formation in the region in its own right, even without extending the thread of the argument to the regime question. What must be noted clearly, however—since at first glance the book seems to suggest otherwise—is that it does not make any explicit assertion that party system characteristics are key for explaining today's regimes. The author successfully avoids the trap of claiming such overambitious analytical power for her argument. On the whole, this volume provides highly valuable food for thought for Middle East specialists, but also for comparativists. It will trigger discussions among the latter as to its theoretical underpinnings and its innovative though complex research design. Even if some readers may not share the entire argument, the volume enriches the current mainstream literature and thus is a welcome addition to Middle East studies.