In William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, the main protagonist grapples with her violent personal history, producing an oft-cited line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Alanna C. Torres-Van Antwerp aptly quotes Faulkner in her new book, Legacies of Repression in Egypt and Tunisia: Authoritarianism, Political Mobilization, and Founding Elections, a compelling study of party formation and political mobilization in founding elections. In the author’s argument, the authoritarian past does not die with a transition but continues to structure postauthoritarian politics.

The book begins with a motivating puzzle from Egypt. After the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, his 30th year of rule, a flurry of parties emerged to contest free and fair parliamentary elections. When the dust settled, however, those parties with more electoral experience fared poorly. Successors to existing political parties with electoral experience, the Wafd, Tagammu’, and Ghad parties, won negligible percentages. Despite its long organizational history, the Egyptian left neither formed a new party to contest the elections nor supported other parties with ideological affinities. In contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) and the Salafi Nour Party, which won a combined 65 percent of parliamentary seats, had been excluded from elections under Mubarak. Further complicating the picture, the FJP faced a steep decline in support after its surprising electoral victory: After just 18 months in office, FJP presidential candidate Mohammed Morsi was removed from power in an extremely popular coup d’état.

Building on the specifics of the Egyptian case, Torres-Van Antwerp sets out to answer three questions related to founding elections more broadly. First, what determines whether an opposition group will form a political party following a regime transition to compete in founding elections? Second, what determines whether formed parties will be successful in mobilizing voters? And third, what determines whether newly formed parties survive or dissolve following founding elections? She argues that authoritarian-era political opportunity structures influence the processes of party formation and political mobilization during founding elections, as well as oppositional successor party survival after founding elections, by endowing individual political opposition parties with different resources that persist into the new era.

Political opportunity structures (POS) are the “boundaries and constraints around political participation” (p. 23). POS exist on a spectrum from more open to more closed. Relatively speaking, authoritarian regimes lie toward the closed end of the spectrum compared to democratic systems. However, there is also important variation within the category of authoritarian regimes. Among authoritarian regimes, more open POS permit a higher number of parties to form by more types of actors and impose fewer restrictions on political mobilization. By contrast, a fully closed POS excludes all rival parties from political contestation.

Torres-Van Antwerp identifies variation in the opportunities individual parties face within a given POS as regimes selectively include, co-opt, or repress opposition groups. First, included groups are permitted to participate in elections but pay a price for their inclusion and are rendered ineffective. As a result, included groups enter the postauthoritarian period with few ties to average citizens, little experience of effective mobilization, and a reputation of complicity with the previous regime. Second, co-opted groups are those that strike a corporatist bargain with the regime. By granting selective benefits through state-sanctioned institutional structures, the regime removes a potentially powerful mobilized opposition from political competition. Co-opted groups enter the postauthoritarian period with ties to their base but few ties to other political groups. Finally, excluded groups cannot participate in the party system. Regimes declare these parties illegal and actively repress them, forcing them to rely on interpersonal networks for recruitment, communication, and mobilization. When excluded groups face heavy repression, they turn from overtly political activities to other kinds of work, including charity. As a result, excluded groups enter the postauthoritarian period with extensive networks of reliable members as well as a positive reputation because of their charitable work and the repression they suffered.

In short, excluded groups are the best positioned to contest founding elections when compared to included and co-opted groups. However, the positive effects of the authoritarian period wane quickly for excluded groups; their respectable reputation quickly falls away as voters blame them for policy failures and secretive organizational structures, which served excluded groups well in the authoritarian period, prove bad for business in the democratic era. This builds nicely on Ellen Lust’s Structuring Conflict in the Arab World: Incumbents, Opponents, and Institutions (2005), extending the argument by theorizing how opposition parties, as formed by authoritarian structures of contestation, fare in competitive elections following liberalization.

In process tracing the events preceding and following the 2011 founding elections, Torres-Van Antwerp theorizes the set of mechanisms through which authoritarian POS influence important outcomes at this critical juncture. The analysis relies on extensive interview, public opinion, ethnographic, and primary- and secondary-source data collected during 12 months of in-country fieldwork in 2012. The theory neatly explains the story of the 2011 Egyptian parliamentary elections: The excluded Muslim Brotherhood founded a party that fared well in founding elections but quickly lost support, while the included loyal opposition formed parties that fare poorly, and the co-opted leftist opposition failed to form or support a political party.

To test the generalizability of these mechanisms, Torres-Van Antwerp conducts theory-testing process tracing of five comparative cases: Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Tunisia, and Zambia. These are cases in which an opposition group won founding elections after an authoritarian era and are drawn from the larger population of post–Third Wave transitions. While the book’s argument sometimes resembles Anna Grzymala-Busse’s Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of Communist Parties in East Central Europe (2002) and Adrienne LeBas’s From Protest to Parties: Party-Building and Democratization in Africa (2011), the careful comparative process tracing is a notable and distinctive strength of the book. By rigorously testing mechanisms developed from Egypt in post-Communist Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan African, and South American cases, the author demonstrates the universality of the identified mechanisms. She also does a commendable job of making difficult political moments in complicated cases accessible to a comparative audience. From this perspective, the Arab Spring transitions prove less unique than is often surmised. Islamists are not inherently more powerful than other opposition actors due to essentialist notions of ideology and religion. Instead, they are products of the political systems from which they emerge. The organizational weakness of the Arab left, often cited as having a particularly detrimental effect on democratization in the region, is similarly a product of authoritarian structures rather than culture broadly defined and is a characteristic shared by many failed transitions.

Torres-Van Antwerp’s comprehensive study inspires three questions for future research. First, why do authoritarian regimes repress, co-opt, and tolerate opposition differently? A causal argument about the effect of POS should make mention of their origins so the reader is not left wondering about endogeneity or an omitted variable. Second, what explains the formation of nonopposition successor parties and their success in founding elections? The author correctly identifies a gap in the literature and turns her analytical focus to opposition successor parties, but leaves questions around new parties and regime successor parties unanswered. Regarding the former, even mild success in founding elections is surprising for complete political newcomers given their total lack of experience. Regarding the latter, the table on page 285 suggests that the success of a party affiliated with the former regime is the second most common outcome in founding elections. Finally, is “founding elections” the right conceptualization of the phenomenon under study? The term suggests the beginning of something new, and with the passage of time we know that many of the “founding elections” identified in the book did not initiate a democratic era.

Scholars who analyze the transformation (or lack thereof) of parties and party systems during and after regime change, as well as those who want to make sense of the brief period of competitive elections in Egypt, will find rigorous theoretical inspiration and convincing evidence in this important book.