This book examines what the author calls “the new authoritarianism” in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), differentiated from the “old” one by its postpopulist ruling coalitions and policies, combined with limited liberalization of the political system. Stephen King seeks to explain how the “old” populist authoritarian regimes made this transition without destabilization or being forced down the “slippery slope” from limited political liberalization to democratization. King's explanation focuses on the combination of two elements: 1) Privatization of public assets is used to generate the patronage resources to create new crony-capitalist social bases of support for regimes, and 2) single or dominant party systems and corporatist mass syndicates created in the populist period are retained to demobilize mass opposition to these changes. The book, though written before the Arab uprisings of 2011, does help us to understand their causes.

This study fits in the voluminous literature on what Steven Heydemann has called “authoritarian upgrading” in the Middle East. The dominant approach within this field, the study of “electoral authoritarianism” and of hybrid regimes, has stressed elite manipulation of electoral rules, divide and rule, rent, coercion, and international support to explain how opposition is managed. But it seldom explicitly distinguishes the social purposes of postpopulist from populist authoritarianism, a main virtue of King's analysis. The alternative approach, on which his work builds, argues that postpopulist authoritarianism differs from the old populist authoritarianism in the social classes that authoritarian power served.

This new approach is represented in the work of Raymond Hinnebusch (“Liberalization without Democratization in ‘Post-populist’ Authoritarian States: Evidence from Syria and Egypt,” in Nils Butenschon, Uri Davis, and Manuel Hassassian, Citizenship and the State in the Middle East, 2000) and by Marsha Pripstein Posusney (Labor and the State in Egypt: Workers, Unions and Economic Restructuring, 1979). Also in this tradition is work on the changed purposes of corporatism after populism, such as Anoushiravan Ehteshami and Emma Murphy, “The Transformation of the Corporatist State in the Middle East,” Third World Quarterly 17 [Special Issue, no. 4, 1996]: pp. 753–772); work that argues that economic liberalization obstructed democratization, such as Eberhard Kienle's A Grand Delusion: Democracy and Economic Reform in Egypt (2001); and work that shows how authoritarian regimes either adapted to economic liberalization by creating new supportive social forces, such as Heydemann's edited volume Networks of Privilege in the Middle East: The Politics of Economic Reform Revisited (2004), or used patronage to survive limited political liberalization, such as Maye Kassem's Egyptian Politics: The Dynamics of Authoritarian Rule (2004).

King's special contribution is to focus on a combination of master variables from both the hitherto mentioned approaches, namely, the social forces served by policy and the single party/corporatist political technology used to master opposition. In addition, his richly detailed case studies amply illustrate the argument and provide systematic insights into the politics of postpopulist authoritarianism.

King's book begins with a survey of the literature on authoritarian resilience. He then provides a conceptual framework incorporating multiple levels of analysis, beginning with the most macro-level (structures such as the international system, globalization), then moving “downward” to middle-level variables, such as socioeconomic conditions, the balance of class power, and political institutions. Once these levels are exhausted, his analysis treats the microagential level, such as political groups and, finally, leadership. While the more macro-level conditions, such as an economic crisis, constrain agents (groups and leadership), they also can be opportunities for leaders to generate new bases of support and legitimacy.

There follows an overview of the old authoritarianism in four countries—Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Tunisia. The dividing line between “old” and new authoritarianism is the turn to privatization. The heart of the book is King's detailed account analysis of how these regimes used privatization to generate crony-capitalist support bases and manipulated institutions to incorporate these new elements, while containing those who would have the most to gain from democratization—workers and peasants. This dynamic prevented the emergence of democratic coalitions uniting elements of the bourgeoisie and working class. Authoritarian persistence cannot be explained by coercion alone and, indeed, the logic of authoritarian rule is to include some social forces in order to exclude others; hence, it has to be explained by reference both to how supporters are created and to how opponents are controlled. King does just this in his double focus on the patronage resources and the corporatist control mechanisms of “new authoritarianism.”

In all four countries, the relatives and cronies of presidents and ministers managed to use privatization to acquire public assets. In Egypt, for example, privatization involved selling public companies at below-market prices to a small group of crony capitalists—often friends of Hosni Mubarak and involved in Gamal Mubarak's policies committee within the ruling National Democratic Party—including the biggest business oligarchs in the country. By 2000, 138 state-owned enterprises had been sold for less than $8 billion, with many purchases made by unsupported, never repaid, loans from state-owned banks. Public monopolies were thereby transformed into private ones. At the same time, a reversal of Gamal Abdel Nasser's tenancy laws led to widespread expulsions of peasants from their land; subsidies and job security were cut for ordinary people and the tax burden shifted from the rich to the middle class. Similar developments are chronicled in the other cases. King might have put more stress on the variations among the cases and on explaining these differences; thus, privatization in Syria has hardly begun, compared to the other cases. Attention to such variations might have allowed King to assess the relative importance of the various factors pushing toward new authoritarianism.

King's analysis refutes the conventional wisdom on the positive relation between capitalism and democratization, illustrating how they can conflict. It also refutes the neoclassical political economy literature that sees privatization and the move to the market as a way of reducing rent seeking; the author shows that the opposite happened in MENA. His account also exposes the differential impact of neoliberal globalization, with its pressures for privatization, on domestic politics: thus, the book concludes with an account of cases such as Spain and Latin America, where democratization predated the neoliberal-driven move to privatization. Hence, authoritarian elites lacked significant patronage resources usable to marginalize opponents; this contrasts with the Middle East, which faced democratizing pressures after neoliberal hegemony, allowing authoritarian elites to use pressure for privatization to preserve authoritarianism.

It is interesting that King also suggests that “democratic” elites in places such as Latin America and Eastern Europe had the chance to use privatization to consolidate postauthoritarian regimes. This is congruent with research on how a move to “low-intensity democracy” paralleled neoliberal globalization in many regions and on how the victims of neoliberalism were kept from using democratic empowerment to obstruct it. Thus, placing the Middle East case in comparative perspective brings out the importance of the timing of privatization and democratization in terms of whether the outcome was to be new authoritarianism or low intensity democracy. But for ordinary people, regime type mattered little in the end. King's account also exposes the flaws in the West's efforts to export democracy: While it is often acknowledged that the “war on terrorism” in the MENA region has conflicted with the West's purported push for democratization there, he shows how the West's neoliberal economic policies also contradict its democratization discourse.

Is King's analysis rendered obsolete by the Arab uprising in 2011? His account, in common with the whole school of “authoritarian upgrading” in the Middle East, may have overestimated the resilience of authoritarian rule, although it remains relevant in understanding how the region's authoritarian regimes survived by more than two decades the third wave of democratization. What this approach may have insufficiently highlighted was that for every gain made by regimes through techniques of authoritarian upgrading, there were hidden costs that, in the longer term, destabilized them. Arguably, too, King overestimated the capacity of ruling parties to contain opposition; it is now clear that they had been debilitated by the move away from populism. Nevertheless, his work stands out, in this literature, for exposing the costs of “upgrading,” above all the abandonment by regimes of their former populist constituencies and the growing inequality accompanying neoliberal policies and particularly privatization.

All in all, this book is important for our understanding of authoritarian persistence, the political economy of economic liberalization and the current breakdown of authoritarian upgrading in the Middle East.