Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origin of Durable Authoritarianism Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. pp. 656.

W h y do s o m e ––a nd not other, of course— regimes survive? Surveying a comprehensive range of historical and more contemporary examples, Levitsky and Way's Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism is an important contribution to scholarship that seeks to answer this fundamental question. While much of comparative political specifically, and political science more broadly, centers on democratic regimes and their fragility (and cases of stability, to be fair), why some authoritarian regimes "succeed" over multiple generations is less well understood. By focusing on the authoritarian regimes that emerge from social revolutions, Levitsky and Way's excellent work succeeds in furthering our understanding of these subsets of authoritarian durability.