Salafism and Political Order in Africa. By Sebastian Elischer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 304p. $89.99 cloth, $29.99 paper.

main contribution to the literature on comparative political economy and mass politics in advanced capitalist countries. In their own summary, the book shows that “the crisis, as gauged by timing of elections and per capita growth rates, affected mass politics ... [but] these effects were usually filtered through parties’ policy and rhetorical responses” (p. 188). The authors demonstrate that the crisis generated less insecurity in countries with more redistributive taxtransfer systems and also show that redistribution offset the negative effects of slow economic growth on electoral participation. These results make intuitive sense, but I am not convinced they tell us much about the strategic behavior of political elites, as distinct from the effects of long-standing policy legacies. I am also unsure about what to make of the authors’ finding that an emphasis in party platforms on the need to maintain or improve unemployment benefits led to an increase in support for public spending on the unemployed during the Great Recession. Couldn’t the causal arrows just as well go in the opposite direction? Regarding support for Left parties, the analysis of the interaction between growth rates and welfare rhetoric yields significant but puzzling results: Both before and during the crisis, economic growth seems to have boosted support for Left parties with strong welfare commitments, but the opposite relationship holds for the postcrisis period. Yet another empirical finding featured by the authors is that the effects of fiscal policy stance on support for incumbent parties depends on economic growth: Especially in the postcrisis period, governments pursuing expansionary fiscal policies have fared well when economic growth has been strong and no better than “austerian” governments when growth has been weak. To my mind, this observation raises the important question of what constrains “constrained partisanship” (a term that the authors borrow from the 2015 volume edited by Beramendi, Häusermann, Kitschelt, and Kriesi). Some of authors’ formulations seem premised on the idea that fiscal stimulus is a growth-enhancing policy that any government could pursue if it so wished. An alternative view would be that the growth-enhancing effects of fiscal stimulus vary across capitalist economies. In the former case, we badly need a political explanation of why so many governments opted for austerity in the wake of the Great Recession; in the latter case, we need to take “varieties of capitalism” or “growth models” into account. I do not wish to contest the top-down approach to mass politics advocated by the authors. Before I read their book, I was convinced that “what parties do makes a difference” (p. 198) and, having read it, I am even more convinced. Still, I would have liked to hear more from the authors on why parties (and governments) do what they do and, more directly pertinent to their project, how policy choices and elite rhetoric explain the differences in causal dynamics between precrisis and postcrisis mass politics. Notwithstanding these criticisms, scholars will find much to learn from this book.