Book Reviews|Comparative Politics: Information, Democracy, and Autocracy: Economic Transparency and Political (In)Stability. By Hollyer, James R., Rosendorff, B. Peter, and Vreeland, James Raymond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 396p. $99.99 cloth, $39.99 paper

The book provides a new measurement approach to transparency through an array of formal models, which examine the implications of transparency on autocracies and democracies, and qualitative case studies that walk through the logic of their findings in key country cases. The missingness in data such as criminal justice indicators (for example, in crime rates, conviction rates, and police expenditures), health indicators (which can be sparse outside of life expectancy and infant mortality), or various inputs to state capacity indexes can all be conceived as depending on different latent quantities about which a regime is being strategically silent. [...]they claim that transparency can make the collective action problem easier to solve and thus can either destabilize unprepared autocracies or reinforce the power of savvy dictators who use the threat of mass uprising to unify elites; in addition, utility gains from increased FDI come on the heels of economic transparency.