As Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way's gracious review demonstrates, Ordering Power and Competitive Authoritarianism share much in common. Yet their two main critiques helpfully underscore how our books are also significantly dissimilar. Their skepticism about my book's generalizability highlights our divergent approaches to generalization, while their claim that revolutionary regimes are as robust as counterrevolutionary regimes reflects our different thinking about cohesion and stability.

The generalizability of Ordering Power rests on explicit theoretical microfoundations. Elite collective action underpins both state power and authoritarian durability, but factionalism makes elite collective action elusive. The strongest foundation for elite collective action is “protection pacts”: broad elite coalitions unified by shared perceptions of endemic and unmanageable mass threat. While most recent studies of authoritarian durability rest on Olsonian or Aristotelian microfoundations—i.e., selective benefits and redistributive fears—my theoretical account is resolutely Hobbesian. It thus invites transhistorical testing. Future research will as likely uncover protection pacts in the counterrevolutions that followed the French Revolution and Florence's Ciompi revolt as in the postcolonial world.

The key issue for generalizability is not whether protection pacts are rare, but whether my causal framework overpredicts them. It is important to recognize that Ordering Power explicates three general counterrevolutionary trajectories (domination, fragmentation, and militarization), not just one. By detailing why only some kinds of contentious politics stimulate elite collective action, it explains why protection pacts are relatively uncommon. By building on a microfoundational assumption of elite factionalism, it predicts that state/regime fragmentation will be the modal authoritarian outcome. The postcolonial world broadly reflects this. My book's contribution rests equally on explaining why state/regime fragmentation (à la Thailand and the Philippines) is common and why state/regime domination (à la Malaysia and Singapore) is rare.

Within the trajectory of militarization (à la Burma and Indonesia), Ordering Power transcends a purely path-dependent approach by showing how party building in initially militarized regimes can produce elite friction and fragmentation, rather than equilibrium. Regime durability in such cases rests more on the institutional balancing act of an autocrat than the dominance of a ruling party. Suharto's Indonesia is my example, but Mubarak's Egypt offers another. Like Suharto, Mubarak gradually sidelined his military and privileged his civilian allies in the presidential clique and ruling party. Such institutional balancing and political personalization riskily reduced the military's stake in regime survival. Absent massive protest, this worked fine. Yet in Egypt as in Indonesia, a cross-class urban uprising led the military to abandon an inconvenient autocrat who was widely perceived as a racketeer, not a protector.

The recent wave of Middle Eastern revolutions reinforces two additional points. One is that democratic revolutions are better conceived as impassioned national cries for collective liberation and protection from racketeering tyrants than as class-driven appeals for redistribution. Another is that the most durable dictatorships do not rest on delivering patronage or coddling the wealthy, but on a history of “ordering power”: extracting and organizing political, economic, and symbolic resources from a wide array of elites. The superficially sudden fragility of so many Middle Eastern regimes has deep roots in the accumulating vulnerabilities of “provision pacts” that fail to order power over time.

In sum, the most durable authoritarian Leviathans are not simply cohesive; they reliably order power from elites toward themselves. Their resultant power advantages help them avoid challenges and crises, not just survive them. History shows that counterrevolutions are a stronger foundation than revolutions for this sort of cohesion and stability. Even Soviet power was built as much through what Trotsky called Stalin's “Soviet Thermidor” as through Lenin's revolution. And even China's leaders recognize that the best playbook for authoritarian durability is the one used by Lee Kuan Yew, not Chairman Mao.