In the course of my fieldwork in Egypt, I once directly asked an official affiliated with the NDP why the regime in Egypt continued to hold competitive parliamentary elections given the political risks. Political violence remains a common feature of parliamentary elections, and the regime not infrequently is required to perpetuate fraud and repression to quell the success of Islamist candidates. The party official responded that elections give the regime a new lease on life. Elections, it seems, are a key to the regime's very survival, and a counterfactual claim implicit to this project is that, absent these elections, the regime would not be so durable.

This book has sought to more fully articulate the specific ways in which elections contribute to the durability of the authoritarian regime in Egypt. Whereas existing explanations for the persistence of authoritarianism have described autocracy as an historic by-product of Egypt's natural environment or an outgrowth of the country's religious or cultural tradition, this project instead builds on a growing literature that considers the institutional basis for autocratic persistence in Egypt with a particular focus on how competitive multiparty elections have stabilized aspects of rule under Hosni Mubarak. Although it has been argued that elections inflame state–society tension in authoritarian regimes, this project has found that elections help to solve certain types of problems, particularly problems related to the distribution of scarce resources.