Already shaken by the investigation into the mixed outcomes of the third wave of democratization, optimism about the prospects of democracy seems now definitively misplaced. After years of quite stable growth, the relative share of democratic regimes has started decreasing and, during the last 10–15 years, countries experiencing democratic regressions have outnumbered those experiencing democratic improvements. No doubt alarming in political terms, this negative trend requires careful analysis and invites to examine the dynamics of recent processes of democratic regression, de-democratization and authocratization. This is the focus of Luca Tomini's book, which, through a sophisticated research design, provides interesting insights about the specific causal mechanisms of transitions from democratic to non-democratic rule.

The book forcefully – and sensibly – argues for the asymmetry between similar reverse processes, on the one hand, and processes of democratization, on the other: it must not be assumed that the causes of reverse processes will simply coincide with the absence of factors explaining democratization, or that transitions from democratic rule will follow backward the typical paths of democratic transitions. More precisely, the author maintains that reverse processes should be considered the focus of ‘an autonomous research agenda within the field of democratization studies’ (p. 3). Accordingly, the book starts with a clever review of the recent literature concerning specifically transitions from the democratic rule, which, as the author signals, still mirrors the traditional divide between contributions focusing primarily on structural conditions and contributions devoted mainly to the role of actors. On the contrary, the book combines the two perspectives in order to develop a more comprehensive explanation of the phenomenon.

After showing that, though marginal during 1980s and early 1990s, transitions from democratic rule have significantly intensified from the beginning of the 21st century, the author employs the so-called two-step Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) approach to investigate both their remote and their proximate conditions. The former set of conditions refer to the long-term structural features of the context at stake, while the latter set captures the contextual features that can be traced back to the exercise of agency, namely, those features the actors can affect or manipulate. The analysis of the remote conditions focuses on a variety of dimensions – political, social, and international – and it discloses the explanatory significance of specific contextual configurations: contexts marked by socio-economic inequalities; and contexts characterized by the lack of socio-economic development combined with the presence of ethno-linguistic divides. In similar contexts, as the analysis of the proximate conditions reveals, three further factors, when taken in pairs, play a relevant explanatory role: concentration of executive power, volatility of the party system, and social instability.

By combining the contextual configurations with the pairs of proximate factors, the author spells out different paths of transition from democratic rule, which deserve further investigation. Interestingly, since the analysis also signals possible overlapping among similar paths, the cases to be examined more closely are selected on the basis of a theoretical framework that comprises two dimensions, both directly linked to the role of actors. The first one is the civil-military dimension, which allows to discriminate between transitions prompted by civilians only and transitions involving the interaction between military and civilian actors. The second dimension, instead, concerns loyalty to democracy and it enables to distinguish between cases in which the incumbents are committed to democratic values and cases in which they are not. The two dimensions provide a typology that includes four models of transition from democratic rule: ‘incumbent entrenchment’, occurring when non-democratic incumbents react to pressures from the opposition by endorsing authoritarian strategies; ‘opposition takeover’, indicating the subversion of democratic governments by civilian opposition forces; ‘democratic coup’, designating scenarios in which incumbent governments are perceived as acting undemocratically and are deposed by the military; ‘stabilizing coup’, taking place when democratic incumbents are unable to cope with challenges to stability and are overthrown by the military.

Each model of transition is scrutinized thoroughly by relying on process-tracing techniques and, for each of them, the analysis focuses on two cases, which are selected among those that typically exemplify the different paths of transition emerged through QCA. In this way, the author links with major clarity the investigation about the role of actors with the findings concerning proximate and remote conditions. All selected cases are investigated in the truly enjoyable fashion of a detective story. The starting point is a concise summary of the relevant events, which are then framed in a broader scenario, thus accounting for both structural contextual conditions and proximate factors. The second step is the identification of the ‘suspect’, namely, of the ‘missing piece of the causal puzzle linking conditions with outcome’ (p.77). Finally, as in all detective stories worthy of their name, the last step of the analysis reveals the ‘whole story, putting all pieces together and exposing the complete mechanism responsible for the outcomes’ (p. 77).

The choice of applying the exact same pattern of analysis consistently throughout the investigation proves fruitful: it makes it very easy, for the readers, to follow the comparison between the selected cases – Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Venezuela, Gambia, Nigeria, Thailand, Mali and Turkey – and to appreciate the grounds supporting the author's more general conclusions. Tough spoilers about detective stories are certainly annoying, I hope they will be excused in this case for the findings presented in the final part of the book are interesting and deserve to be spelled out. In particular, the analysis shows that the crucial structural condition for transitions from the democratic rule is the presence of mutually reinforcing inequalities: similar transitions occur in contexts characterized by economic disparities that reflect both ethno-linguistic, religious or regional differences and political inequalities, such as disproportional opportunities for representation or unequal access to political resources. The analysis also points to crises, of various nature, as the contingent causal mechanism that opens up the possibility for transitions from democratic rule. As the author signals, crises ‘play a catalytic role, breaking the balance that sustained democracy’(p. 164), a balance that, in the presence of mutually reinforcing inequalities, is particularly fragile.

Moreover, the analysis fully substantiates the fruitfulness of taking the role of actors seriously into account. In fact, the analysis interestingly shows that threats to democratic regimes can come from both incumbent and opposition forces. When crises strike, governments can certainly turn authoritarian to cope more effectively with growing opposition. However, democratic governments can be overthrown, not only by the military but also by civilian opposition, which, reacting to a crisis, can radicalize and pursue a non-democratic agenda. The crucial point is, indeed, that the actors’ political commitments are decisive: when the conditions are favourable, the occurrence of transitions from the democratic rule can be traced back to actors who are disloyal to democracy.

Through a lucid and insightful analysis, Luca Tomini's worth-reading book provides a timely and comprehensive investigation into the dynamics of recent transitions toward non-democratic regimes. It also offers, although indirectly, insights about the elements – mutually reinforcing inequalities and crises – which can contribute to jeopardize the legitimacy of democratic regimes and should, therefore, attract specific attention to avoid democratic regressions.