In recent years, there has been an exciting growth in scholarship analyzing the motivations for policy provision in societies characterized by politicized ethnic divisions. James Habyarimana and his colleagues’ comprehensive study of public goods provision in Uganda (Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action, 2009) is perhaps among the most significant scholarship in this area to date, but their experimental work largely eschews a comprehensive study of the specific formal institutions and organizations that link citizens, governing agents, and street-level bureaucrats. In part, this is entirely understandable given the ambiguities associated with applying extant theories of policy provision and production to postcolonial and postconflict states. On one hand, the dilemmas of consolidating democratic practices in postconflict states, to say nothing of the problems associated with limited state capacity, make the application of state-centered policy theories somewhat convoluted. Further, to the extent that political exchange in many postcolonial states is characterized by high degrees of ethnic or communal competition, we often observe the development of party systems more oriented toward sectarian concerns, as opposed to purely ideological or nationalist motivations. Melani Cammett’s Compassionate Communalism contributes to this discussion through its cultivation of a theory of precisely how and why ethnic parties in postconflict states engage in service provision. By extension, her arguments have important implications for discussions pertaining to the utility of democratic political exchange as a means of rebuilding war-torn societies and the degree to which political parties, as agents of political discourse, can help or hinder that process.

Cammett’s study is motivated by variance in the extent to which sectarian parties provide welfare benefits to citizens outside of a party’s ethnic constituency. The book is particularly interesting precisely because it accepts the attribution/profession dichotomy of identity politics as a central element in ethnic politics. Lebanon, with its legacy of institutionalized ethnic political partition, presents a particularly “hard” case for her theory in this regard. Two sets of governing variables determine variation in a party’s willingness to provide services to out-group members.

First, Cammett suggests that the political objectives of the party determine its broader strategy. Specifically, she suggests that parties that are principally interested in achieving power at the national level are more likely to provide services across sectarian lines. In contrast, parties engaged in “extra-state” activities (high-mobilization-cost activities like militia organization or protests) are likely to limit their service provision to their own members. At root, the collective action problems that parties seek to overcome are very much contingent upon their goals. State-centric actors will typically seek, all else being equal, to maximize support among community members. Consequently, they are far more likely to provide services outside of their core supporters.

Second, a party’s ability to credibly maintain its core supporters while simultaneously providing service access to nongroup members is dependent upon the amount of intrasect competition it faces. The greater the number of viable parties claiming to represent a specific group, the more likely parties representing such groups will limit service provision to their own members. In this regard, inclusive parties are outbid by more exclusivist parties who can credibly claim that more moderate parties are less concerned with sectarian interests and therefore less committed to representing the core issues most relevant to the group.

The study is significant for two reasons. First, provision of social services is a difficult task in most developing societies, but it is especially difficult in countries riven by communal animosities that make state agencies, at least in the near term, decidedly noncredible service providers. In societies characterized by recent conflict, it is scarcely surprising that emergent parties use service production to cultivate a base. What is significant, however, is precisely why and how they choose to do so. The potency of local party organizations in nineteenth-century United States, for example, created powerful institutional incentives for partisan machines to dole out services across ethnic lines in order to establish winning coalitions. Cammett’s book highlights ways that these dynamics vary, not merely according to the power of highly localized partisan machines but perhaps more importantly in terms of when and how electoral incentives matter.

Secondly, and related to the first point, this book has powerful implications for the study of democratization and its longer-term impacts on state development. To a large extent, the study of parties has been understandably shaped by theoretical accounts advanced by Anthony Downs and John Aldrich that question whether parties and their politicians produce policy to get elected or whether they seek office to advance policy, and the degree to which the party-in-the-electorate helps to drive these dynamics. Cammett’s theory suggests that this approach may be incomplete in postconflict societies where the principal goal may not necessarily be the implementation of policy or the winning of elected office. Parties use service delivery to solidify membership at all levels of society, hardening extant ethnic cleavages and making the party a reflection of the type of society they wish to create. To the extent that many postconflict states are still in the process of establishing a coherent notion of nationalist boundaries, parties and the actors who create them may see office as a decidedly irrelevant objective. Comparativists working in postconflict states should take heed of the author’s observations.

Cammett’s empirical work is impressive. The book’s methodological soundness alone would make it an excellent addition to a graduate course on comparative qualitative methods. That said, the text’s key contributions lie at the intersection of ethnic and sectarian conflict and competition, party formation, and comparative public policy. Comparative public policy has generally had difficulty, and historically might even be accused of having a reluctance toward addressing dilemmas of service provision and production in postcolonial and postconflict states. Milton Esman is perhaps the most prominent analyst of policy provision and production in such societies, and for many years his call for increased focus on the patterns of policy production in such contexts was largely peripheralized by scholars of ethnic politics. Cammett’s work goes far in bringing these questions into the fold of comparative politics.