The powerful wave or waves of democratization in the past thirty years beached dozens of countries on the shores of democracy, where some now prosper while others lie gasping. But some countries seem to be caught in the undertow, never getting very close to a transition. Jason Brownlee is one of a growing number of scholars who want to understand the dynamics of these still-authoritarian regimes: why do some make it to democracy while others stubbornly hold back? Samuel Huntington and Andreas Schedler have argued that authoritarian regimes are subject to a distinctive logic if they hold elections: more likely either to undergo a transition to democracy or to become less democratic, and less likely to stay as they are. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way claim that “competitive authoritarian” regimes are likely to become democracies only if they have dense transnational linkages with Western democracies. Brownlee, like Barbara Geddes, believes that the impact of elections on authoritarianism depends not on transnational linkages, but on whether or not the regime sponsors a ruling party. Authoritarian regimes with ruling parties are able to persuade or force a diverse set of elites, including potential challengers, to collaborate, cooperate, keep quiet, or simply wait patiently for a future opening. Those without a party eventually become politically isolated: potential challengers desert the ruling coalition and become actual challengers, throwing the regime into a political crisis, and sometimes forcing it into a democratic transition. Geddes established the initial plausibility of this argument by developing its logic and exposing it to a first simple empirical test. Brownlee bolsters the evidence for it, both quantitatively and qualitatively. His quantitative test, which uses an expanded sample and more control variables than Geddes did, finds strong support for the hypothesis that single-party regimes are less likely to break down than personalist authoritarian regimes, even when controlling for per capita GDP, economic growth, region, having limited elections, and the age of the regime.

This is an important and interesting finding, but Brownlee dedicates the bulk of the book to historical institutionalist process-tracing designed to reveal the difference that ruling parties can make, in four case studies. Egypt and Malaysia are portrayed as authoritarian regimes that survived for decades by relying on official parties; Iran and the Philippines as authoritarian regimes that succumbed to political instability after dissolving their ruling parties. Because this examination of a half-century of history in four countries in Asia and the Middle East is ambitious, it is bound to be unconvincing at times. Nevertheless, it was worth the attempt and is worth reading, and even its weaknesses will be instructive to those who wish to follow Brownlee on this path.

One problem is that it is difficult to define and apply concepts in a clear, consistent way from case to case and period to period. For example, Brownlee argues that ruling parties form when “initial elite conflicts” are “resolved” during the “regime formation period,” producing “elite cohesion” (p. 36). Such formulations raise many definitional questions. Who counts as elite? How much disagreement between them must be present to count them as being in conflict? Does it matter whether conflicts are “resolved” by mutual consent rather than violently? How can we tell when the “regime formation period” ends and the period of “institutional legacies” begins? Without clear answers to such questions, a theory ceases to be falsifiable. It is not clear that the “elite cohesion” achieved in Malaysia by alliances and electoral coalitions is really comparable to the “elite cohesion” achieved in Egypt by the marginalization of opposition via electoral fraud and the imprisonment of thousands of militants of the Muslim Brotherhood. Furthermore, as Brownlee admits, the pattern of regime consolidation in Iran up to 1981 was very similar to that in Egypt; subsequently, Brownlee argues that Egyptian elites were bound together by the official party into long-term coalitions, while Iranian elites formed merely “tactical” alliances. The distinction is crucial for Brownlee's argument, but how can we be certain that the feuding within the Iranian clergy represented a greater challenge to the regime than the “internecine struggle” that Nasser bequeathed to Sadat (p. 89), not to mention the ongoing conflict between Egyptian rulers and the Muslim Brotherhood? And is it possible to make a clear distinction between tactical alliances and long-term coalitions when provisional bargains struck in haste to deal with a short-term problem sometimes become institutionalized? The criteria for making such distinctions are not spelled out.

Another challenge is the difficulty of demonstrating the independent contribution of ruling parties to regime stability. Brownlee argues that ruling parties make a decisive difference because they “provide a political setting for mediating elite disputes” (p. 42) and traces the weakening of authoritarian rule in Iran and the Philippines to Khomeini's dissolution of the Islamic Republic Party in 1987 and Marcos's dissolution of the Nacionalista Party in 1972. The timing of these events is certainly consistent with the theoretical argument. However, it would be useful to know whether the dissolutions of these parties were contributing causes of subsequent instability rather than only reflections of more structural causes. Would Iran and the Philippines have descended into elite dissensus anyway even if the ruling party had remained in place in each country, and could the Egyptian and Malaysian regimes have lasted for decades anyway, even if their ruling parties had been dismantled? The analysis does not address these counterfactuals. We are left to wonder whether the elite cohesion (or whatever causes elite cohesion) that explains the formation of the parties is also a sufficient explanation for the longevity of authoritarianism, making the parties all but epiphenomenal. It could be argued that ruling parties and elite cohesion reinforce each other, and elite conflict and the lack of a ruling party reinforce each other in a negative way, but Brownlee does not develop such an argument.

Despite these unanswered questions, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization is a fascinating analysis. It traces the process of regime formation in fine detail – as much as can be expected in a work that has room for about fifty pages per country. Readers will find rich analysis of the interplay of religious actors, economic conditions, the international community, and strong personalities. Those who are familiar with one or two of the cases can learn from the histories that are less familiar to them, and everyone can be stimulated by Brownlee's analytical overlay. With careful case histories and a fuller argument, Brownlee advances research on the longevity of single-party or hegemonic-party authoritarian regimes.