Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War. By Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 517p. $95.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

The literature on hybrid regimes has a new and undisputed heavyweight champion. Eight years after their widely cited Journal of Democracy article first unveiled “competitive authoritarianism” as a distinctive type of hybrid regime, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have constructed a volume that theorizes and traces the trajectories of the countries that have fit into this category since the Cold War's end—all thirty-five of them. While the theoretical ambition of Competitive Authoritarianism stakes the book's rightful claim to the title of hybrid-regime champion, the book's voluminous empirics unmistakably place it in political science's heavyweight class.