The events in Egypt between 2011 and 2013 present a series of empirical puzzles unanswered in the comparative political scholarship: We see puzzling variation with respect to the particular processes of party formation, political mobilization, and opposition group survival or dissolution in the context of regime transitions. These puzzles are particularly evident in Egypt, where a repressed opposition group (the Muslim Brotherhood) won the 2011 founding elections only to be forced from office eighteen months later, while other opposition groups that were active in protesting the Egyptian regime did not even form a political party to run in the 2011 elections. Common explanations for events in Egypt focus on idiosyncratic features of the Egyptian political landscape and fail to explain similar events in other cases in Eastern Europe, Africa, and South America. An approach that takes into account the mechanisms linking the authoritarian past to the events surrounding founding elections offers not only an explanation for events in Egypt but also illuminates comparative cases of founding elections more generally. The book uses comparative process tracing to excavate the mechanisms at play in Egypt and then test them in five comparative cases, linking the authoritarian political ecosystem to the outcome of founding elections.

The first of the book’s five great transitions is the creation of institutions of dynastic succession in Europe and China. Orderly, incontestable hereditary succession afforded dynastic longevity from the ninth century onward, and was a key institutional determinant of long-term economic performance, serving as a hypernetwork that contributed to system-level dynamics. The hypernetwork structures in Europe and China were very different, one being scale-free, the other star-like. Each presented trade-offs between properties of stability and resilience that arose according to widely different adaptive strategies. Historical meta-regimes offer evidence that qualities embedded in macrostructures are distinct from those at the micro levels, and that long-standing institutions are likely to be gradual in formation, but sudden in their demise. Redundancies in Europe’s network of connected dynasties ruling across the continental “fabric” lent resilience to the macro-system. China's system distributed information more efficiently, but with the attendant risk that the collapse of a lone central hub reliant on a powerful bureaucracy would produce cycles of decay during which the population suffered on massive scales.

In this chaper, I examine the relationship between landholding inequality, interventions in agricultural markets, and the stability of authoritarian regimes. I construct measures of the size of rents that are generated by agricultural market distortions. I show that both forms of agricultural rents are much smaller than those originating from oil revenues. I then go on to estimate a series of models of authoritarian regime durability. I test whether landed elites are threatening to authoritarian regimes, and concentrations of landholdings are associated with a greater risk of regime collapse. I find a weak positive relationship between landholding inequality and the likelihood of collapse. I look at the relationship between agricultural rents and regime durability. I find that rents that accrue to the state have no effect on the probability of regime collapse. Rents accruing to agricultural producers, however, do have a significant interactive effect on regime stability. Where landholding inequality is high, regimes that distribute greater rents to the agricultural sector are significantly less likely to break down.