Goran Hyden has a message for comparative political scientists: Western societies must not be considered “both the compass and the end point” (13) for democratic theorizing. In this retrospective, informed by sixty years of deep engagement in African politics, Hyden offers a compelling critique of what comparative politics misses when it fails to consider the African political experience.

In studying democracy, Hyden argues, political scientists have developed normative blinders drawn from an excessive focus on Western advanced industrial societies. These blinders have led to an emphasis on comparative democracy metrics designed from the Western experience that obscure more than they reveal when applied to non-Western settings. Far from being “the only game in town,” Hyden notes that democracy is “played differently depending on a series of factors that have largely been ignored in the dominant literature” (4). Following a helpful chapter that characterizes three major “theoretical spurts” (10) in comparative politics, Hyden organizes the remainder of the book topically, examining how the African experience departs from the assumptions underlying comparative theorizing in historical analysis, social formation, the development of nation-states, regimes and institutions, parties and ideology, and culture and the pub