Amaney Jamal is one of the pioneers in the production and sophisticated use of public opinion survey data for the study of the politics of the Arab world. So it is no surprise that this book on Arab democracy prospects in a period of American hegemony yields important insights based on careful analysis of public opinion data. Few in the field will dispute her point that the United States, despite its rhetorical turn under the George W. Bush administration, has not been a supporter of democracy in the Arab world. But she challenges conventional wisdom on the mechanisms through which the United States bolsters authoritarianism: these are not limited to security commitments and economic aid.

Jamal posits what we might call the rational Arab voter, who sees her economic interests tied up with the increasing integration of her country into the American-led world economy, and who sees the stability provided by American military hegemony as absolutely essential for international investment and economic development. That voter likes democracy (Jamal's own data and that of other surveys overwhelmingly find that Arabs support democracy), but worries that elections will bring to power anti-American groups, particularly Islamists, who will put her country's relationship with the United States at risk. As a rational actor, she privileges her economic interests and supports the authoritarian status quo. Given this rational Arab voter, the United States, in Jamal's view, appears to support authoritarianism not only from the top down. Rather, the system it leads, and largely created, offers rational incentives for some citizens to support authoritarianism from the bottom up. It is not only state–society relations that determine the prospects for democratization and political change, but also the position of a state in the international economic and security hierarchy.

Jamal uses a paired comparison of Jordan and Kuwait to bring this argument out, drawing on both survey data and in-depth interviews in each country. In Kuwait, as a result of the U.S.-led liberation of the country in 1991, Islamists do not take anti-American stands. In Jordan, by contrast, the Islamic Action Front opposes American policy on a range of issues. Jamal's survey evidence indicates that Jordanians who support integration into the global economy are more willing to accept the political status quo and de-emphasize their desire for democracy than are other Jordanians. Her interviews support her individual-level hypothesis that the driver of this preference is the fear that Islamists in power will lead to a break with the United States. In Kuwait, where Islamists accept the country's close relationship with the United States, those who support integration into the global economy are much more supportive of democratic reform than their Jordanian counterparts.

The pairing of Jordan and Kuwait is a very nice test of her argument. Both are pro-American monarchies; both seek greater integration into the world economy; both have legislatures with some amount of power and legislative elections that are not completely controlled by the regime. She can isolate the position of the Islamists as the key variable driving her results. She also has both the survey data and the in-depth interviews to test her argument at both the micro- and macrolevels. The lack of both types of evidence for her secondary cases detracts somewhat from their effectiveness in demonstrating her argument. In Morocco, she had the interview data, which corroborated her hypothesis on the individual-level driver of support for the authoritarian regime, but not the survey data, because the Moroccan government would not allow questions about anti-Americanism to be used in her survey. In Palestine, she had the survey data but not the in-depth interviews. In Saudi Arabia she had neither, relying solely on analytical narrative.

The book was published shortly after the Arab Awakening of 2011, but was researched and largely written before those events. So, how does it stand up in light of this massive regional upheaval? Pretty well. Her argument would lead us to assume that the Jordanian regime would be more stable than many might have thought, because of the fears of its citizens, whose economic interests are tied up with the global economy, about the consequences of regime change and an Islamist rise. This is a more convincing explanation for Jordanian stability than some assumed “legitimacy” of the monarchical system. In Kuwait, her argument is completely consistent with the increased popular pressures we have seen for greater parliamentary power and the current standoff between the regime and the Kuwaiti opposition.

The exportability of Jamal's argument to other cases in the Arab Awakening, however, is an open question. In both Tunisia and Egypt, it appears that many of those whose economic interests are tied up with the integration of their countries into the global economy joined the protests that brought down regimes pursuing just those policies (if corruptly and half-heartedly). While in Tunisia the moderation of al-Nahda arguably made the prospect of Islamist rule look not so frightening to the globalizers, in Egypt it would be hard to argue that the Muslim Brotherhood had become as pro-American as Kuwaiti Islamists. For many of the Egyptian globalizers, at least in 2011, the hope for democracy seemed to trump economic self-interest.

Jamal never claims that her causal argument is the only factor in explaining “the future of democratization trajectories in the Arab world” (p. 222), so it would be unfair to judge her argument based on cases that she herself could not possibly assess (owing to the lack of survey data on Mubarak's Egypt and Ben Ali's Tunisia related to her questions). The next step for those who want to continue her very original and provocative work is to ask how her thesis fits with the events of 2011 and beyond in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere. With this book, Jamal has recast our debate about how the United States affects the issue of democracy in the Arab world. Any discussion of the halting and uncertain path Arab politics has taken since 2011 needs to take account of her argument.