Explaining the absence of liberal democracy in the Middle East was a losing proposition from the get-go. It demanded proving that certain things did not, and perhaps even could not, exist in this part of the world: possessive individualism, effective electoral institutions, the rule of law, and tolerance for divergent political opinions and platforms. It tended to ignore important episodes of liberal democratic governance that might well have survived had things worked out differently. Moreover, most important of all, it implied an underlying teleology, whereby liberal democracy represents the natural state toward which all political systems are moving, however haltingly and despite whatever detours along the way. Nevertheless, only a handful of scholars have abandoned this doomed enterprise and shifted to the much more promising research program of exploring why authoritarian regimes persist and flourish, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere. The ten essays collected here demonstrate not only how hard it is to undertake this crucial conceptual transition, but also how rewarding it can be to make the effort.

Closest to the “why is liberal democracy absent” camp stands Eva Bellin's stimulating discussion of the key factors that have prevented countries across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) from taking the initial steps toward political liberalization (pp. 24–25). The major argument—that “in the MENA region it is the stalwart will and capacity of the state's coercive apparatus to suppress any glimmers of democratic initiative that have extinguished the possibility of transition” (p. 26)—underscores the importance of revisiting the role of the military in Middle East politics. Bellin proposes that “the more institutionalized the security establishment, the more willing it will be to disengage from power and allow political reform to proceed” (p. 28). What one might mean by saying that one country, Egypt, for example, exhibits a greater degree of institutionalization in its military establishment than another, Syria, for instance, remains unclear. Such a statement may well imply that military officers “have a sense of corporate identity separate from the state,” but it seems too much to claim that greater institutionalization also entails “a commitment to some broader national mission that serves the public good, such as national defense and economic development, rather than to personal aggrandizement and enrichment alone” (p. 29). Elaborating the most significant dimensions of this notion will undoubtedly enhance our understanding of the circumstances under which authoritarian regimes persist.

Michael Herb's analysis of the developmental trajectory of constitutional monarchies stands alongside Bellin's essay. By charting recent trends in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman and comparing them to developments in a handful of European kingdoms, Jordan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia, Herb asserts that we can not only “identify some of the proximate barriers to the achievement of rule by parliamentary parties [sic] in the Arab monarchies” but also “bring crucial evidence to bear on whether, and how, these parliaments offer a way toward a more democratic future” for the region (p. 170). Major impediments to the emergence of parliamentary rule include “governments that steal elections,” “constitutions that provide insufficient powers to the parliament,” “an absence of political parties or parliamentary blocs,” and “distortions in the electoral system that lead to an underrepresentation of the opposition in parliament” (p. 175). Such hindrances appear to be least influential in Kuwait, a bit more pressing in Qatar, and most troublesome in Bahrain (pp. 176–80). Again, more work needs to be done, because the seven case studies are far too brief to deal adequately with all of the hypothesized impediments, and the treatment of Bahrain (where “the most serious barrier to parliamentarism … is sectarian,” p. 178) looks much different from the others.

Somewhat closer to the “why does authoritarianism persist” camp lie Ellen Lust-Okar's rigorous discussion of “government-opposition relationships” (p. 144) and Vickie Langohr's thought-provoking overview of the influence of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Lust-Okar argues that authoritarian regimes are more likely to survive whenever they confront divided structures of contestation (“where incumbents allow some political opponents to participate in the political system while excluding others”) and less likely to do so if they face unified structures of contestation, in which either “no political opponents are allowed to participate in the formal political sphere” or “all political opponents participate in the formal system” (p. 146). Despite being, to my mind, overly intentionalist in its assumption that divisions among opposition forces are deliberately created by “incumbent elites” (p. 144), this argument sheds considerable light on domestic struggles in Morocco and Jordan. Langhor advances the startling claim that authoritarian regimes persist whenever opposition movements coalesce into NGOs rather than political parties. Drawing, perhaps inordinately, on the Egyptian experience, she asserts that “NGOs generally advocate the interests of a specific group or the importance of a particular principle, such as respect for human rights, making them ill equipped to mobilize a much broader set of constituencies around the larger goal of regime change” (p. 195). Furthermore, such organizations tend to become tainted by their close ties to foreign actors. Thus, to the extent that NGOs eclipse opposition parties, authoritarian regimes flourish. Whether Langhor single-handedly demolishes a whole generation of research on the democratizing effect of civil society is for others to decide.

Firmly in the “why does authoritarianism persist” camp rest Arang Keshavarzian's overview of current politics in the Islamic Republic of Iran and Michele Angrist's broad-ranging survey of the evolution of Middle Eastern party systems. Keshavarzian demonstrates that although the peculiar political structure of the Islamic Republic generates a wide range of potentially explosive cleavages, both inside the regime and between forces inside and outside the ruling coalition, the very fragmentation of Iranian politics enables the authorities to prevail. This is due partly to the large number of “veto points” that one finds in the domestic arena, partly to pervasive collective action problems among challengers, and partly to the growing “atomization of Iranian society” (pp. 81–82).

Angrist, by contrast, focuses attention on three institutional features of party systems: “the number of parties, polarization levels, and the presence or absence of mobilizational asymmetry” among parties (p. 120). In countries where a single, “preponderant” party was present at the moment of independence, authoritarian regimes took shape immediately; wherever multiple parties existed at independence, authoritarian regimes emerged later; and only in Turkey, where two rival parties existed in 1923, did a nonauthoritarian order take root. One might dispute this argument on a number of grounds. Do we really want to call Tunisia in 1956 a “single-party system”? Was Ben Bella's Algeria authoritarian from the beginning? Were there in fact only two parties in Turkey during the early 1920s? Does the case of Israel refute the whole theory?

Whether one comes away entirely persuaded by the essays in this admirable collection is, however, beside the point. Students of Middle Eastern affairs routinely complain that their work is ignored by the larger discipline of comparative politics. Comparativists from now on do so at their peril, not only because there are severe methodological problems that afflict any study of democratization that includes only positive instances (as Jason Brownlee aptly points out) but also because specialists in Middle East politics can offer promising ways out of the conceptual traps that plague the “transition paradigm.”