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operate in urban areas cultivate electoral constituencies that care more about programmatic issues and are thus harder to co-opt. The book’s evidence includes an impressive array of interviews with leftist, Islamist, and pro-regime politicians, which provide granular detail on how co-optation works. Another notable empirical contribution is a dataset of 440 leftist politicians in Morocco who won office during the communal elections of 2003 and 2009 (p. 101). The author finds that leftist politicians in small communes with mostly illiterate and unemployed constituencies have a higher probability of switching to loyalist parties than those in larger and wealthier communes. Such patterns suggest that the regime tended to co-opt politicians in impoverished areas where clientelism is rampant. Although, as the author acknowledges, the data’s coverage of politicians is severely limited due to restrictions imposed by the Moroccan Interior Ministry. Buehler’s effort to collect such data in a difficult authoritarian context is laudable. The inclusion of Mauritania as a case study should also be applauded, because it brings attention to an understudied case among scholars of autocratic regimes and comparative politics. Why Alliances Fail does not stop at explaining why cooptation succeeds in some cases and fails in others, but further seeks to understand why some opposition parties make themselves vulnerable to co-optation by seeking support in rural areas in the first place. To address this question, Buehler examines the period that followed decolonization in the Maghreb and argues that the ways that regimes consolidated power shortly after independence played a key role in structuring political competition. The Bourguiba regime in post-independence Tunisia built an urban support base, whereas regimes in Morocco andMauritania built rural bases of support. Buehler argues that these early regime-building strategies in Morocco and Mauritania portended future weakness for opposition forces who ended up competing on the regime’s turf in rural areas and became more liable to co-optation. In Tunisia by contrast, the Bourguiba regime had so alienated and politically weakened its rural regions that political parties had little to gain by moving to these areas. The opposition parties in Tunisia retained an urban base and thus were protected from co-optation later. Although Buehler’s argument that regimeconsolidation strategies after independence shape opposition politics is intriguing, it could have been made more compelling by fleshing out the motivations of opposition parties and their reasons for acting. It remains unclear why leftists in Morocco and Islamists in Mauritania would choose to move to rural regions, given the fierce competition they were likely to expect in those places. The reader is left wondering why these parties did not choose to safely remain in urban areas where, according to the author’s argument, they would be shielded from aggressive regime co-optation and why other parties (Islamists in Morocco and leftists in Mauritania) avoided making the same mistakes. The importance of historical precedents could have been more persuasively conveyed by laying out why opposition actors acted the way they did and how these early choices constrained later options. Overall, this book is a strong addition to the literature on coalition politics and authoritarianism and will spark many debates. It illustrates the intricacies of co-optation under authoritarian regimes in ways that promise to enrich future studies on autocratic survival. This book also sheds new light on patterns of regime transitions during the Arab Spring, which is especially valuable to scholars of the Middle East and North Africa. The explanation for why the Moroccan regime survived the Arab Spring, for example, challenges existing arguments that emphasize elite cohesion and the inherent robustness of Arab monarchies. Instead, Buehler draws attention to how the previous co-optation of leftists made the opposition incapable of mounting a serious crossideological challenge to the regime in 2011. This work thus demonstrates the importance of autocratic strategies of co-optation in influencing whether opposition mobilization arises and succeeds.