An amazing piece of scholarship, really a model of what comparative politics can be, combining rich contextual understanding and crazy-sharp a prior reasoning, this really is a monumental piece of work.

Here's how I read the argument:

Institutions -> Ethnicity -> Patronage Expectations -> Elite and Voter Strategic Interaction

I am not going to go into all the detail. It's an intense read because Posner turns the problem over from every angle, building from first principles out to the smallest observable/testable implication.

I have lots of quibbles, of course. I suspect specialists in these issues (especially, I imagine, ethnicity and ethnic politics folks) probably have much more serious criticisms to level. I used it in a PhD seminar on institutional theory, and I thought it worked very well. I might consider using it for the core comparative politics field seminar as well.

Anyway, fascinating book, I learned a ton.