The literature on authoritarianism has witnessed a remarkable renaissance over the last ten to fifteen years and few scholars can claim a more fundamental impact than Andreas Schedler. He provided some of the earliest and most important work arguing for the significance of autocratic institutions and the potential durability of “hybrid” regimes that mix democratic elements with autocratic dominance, as well as ideas on the essential stucture of autocratic political competition. Schedler's new book, The Politics of Uncertainty, presents a comprehensive framing of his theoretical insights and a wide-ranging empirical exploration of the electoral dynamics within autocracies.

It is in the first, theoretical half that the book is at its best. Schedler argues that autocratic politics is driven by two types of uncertainty: the regime's imperfect grip on power and the informational uncertainties of all actors about the regime's popularity and capacity. The book conceives of “competition under and over uncertainty as the driving force of politics under authoritarian rule” (6).

Schedler discusses the roles of information and uncertainty in maintaining power, then overviews the major political institutions within autocracy and how they are manipulated by regimes precisely to influence uncertainty. He places particular attention on autocratic elections and provides an excellent overview of recent scholarship on electoral autocracy. The discussion appropriately focuses on how the regime manipulates citizen uncertainty, although I would have liked to have heard more about how the regime gathers credible information and minimizes uncertainty within its own coalition.

An essential theoretical insight of Schedler's is the two-level nature of regime contention (chap. 4). The opposition fights against the regime both within the electoral game and over the rules of that game. Moreover, victories at one level can be leveraged for advantages in the other, such as when strong legislative oppositions gain concessions on independent electoral bodies or fairer access to the media. It is the complex interplay of this two-level struggle that makes the study of electoral autocracy so compelling and challenging.

The second half of the book engages in empirical testing, successively predicting electoral competitiveness (such as the margin of victory and turnover), the regime's choice of methods of manipulation (such as repression, censorship, and fraud), the opposition's choice of techniques (including boycotts and protests), and regime change. Admirably, many of the variables represent original data collected by the author and he provides excellent overviews of the weaknesses and strengths of existing data sources. The sample consists of 194 autocratic elections held between 1980 and 2002, usually divided between relatively competitive and “hegemonic” autocracies. One choice I'm troubled by is the omission of democratizing elections from the data set. For instance, the 2000 Mexican election is not included as the country democratized with the defeat of the PRI. Besides the theoretical problem that the election was held by an autocratic regime, it carries the empirical drawback of selection on the dependent variable, as party turnover and electoral margins are among the predicted outcomes.

Among the interesting findings are that hegemonic regimes react to rising challenges with repression and fraud, whereas competitive autocracies opt for “softer” techniques like media censorship and the disqualification of opposition leaders (chap. 8). Generally, these techniques are effective at shifting the electoral margin of victory, but mainly in competitive regimes (225). In turn, opposition actions (such as protest) can influence electoral competitiveness, especially when they generate splits within the autocratic coalition (227–31). Moreover, their effects appear to spill over to the following election.

As for regime change (chap. 10), a fascinating finding is that average income predicts democratization in competitive autocracies but stability in hegemonic regimes. Oil wealth and majoritarian electoral systems are negatively associated with liberalization. In contrast to previous work, Schedler does not find that contested elections get gradually freer over time.

These broad-ranging empirical findings are probably best seen as exploratory relationships that should prompt researchers to investigate further, as many are somewhat awkwardly placed between qualitative depth and quantitative rigor. There are neither in-depth case studies nor empirical tests that can be taken as more than suggestive correlations. Due to small-sample issues, the regressions typically contain few or no control variables. As Schedler frequently acknowledges, many of the findings suffer from severe endogeneity problems, hampering the inferences we can draw. To take one example, Schedler finds that fraud is associated with significant declines of electoral margins of victory in hegemonic regimes. Of course, this is likely due to reverse causation: regimes resort to fraud when elections are most threatening. It remains unclear how many of the other relationships are influenced by such problems.

Schedler wisely notes that many of the techniques of opposition and regime manipulation bear fruit only over a long time period. What secures power for the present can erode legitimacy and security in the future. This presents a fascinating tension at the heart of autocratic control, but is investigated here in terms of the effects on the succeeding election. It would be illuminating to see the long-term effects of fraud and repression, similar to how Staffan Lindberg has investigated the cumulative effects of multiparty elections.

A largely missing element in the book is international influence. As scholars such as Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, Susan Hyde, and Judith Kelley have shown, international pressure represents a major predictor of the adoption of autocratic elections, their conduct, and the chances for democratization. International actors reward regimes for political liberalization, provide critical resources and information to opposition figures, and monitor autocratic elections. It may not be an exaggeration to say that international factors matter more than domestic ones for electoral autocracies, but this is only briefly touched on here.

Schedler concludes with important recommendations for the future of democracy assistance. First, he clearly states the advantages of holding autocratic elections relative to nothing, as they at least open up opportunities for legal competition and democratic change. Second, he directs international actors to focus on strengthening legislatures and independent media. Schedler also calls on scholars of autocratic politics to focus more deeply on the role of citizen beliefs, to improve the available cross-national data on autocratic elections, and to investigate the many historical examples of manipulated elections prior to the 1970s. Such scholars would do well to embrace Schedler's theoretical insights on autocracy and to build on the many suggestive and intriguing empirical findings in this book.