Visiting Researcher Michael Seeberg reviews Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s long awaited new book, "Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War." It has been forthcoming for almost 10 years and it is magisterial in size and content. The book’s contribution to the literature is hard to exaggerate. It writes directly into a gap in the literature and does a great job of closing it. Many scholars are interested in the ‘grey zones’ of democratization and they broadly seem to agree that democracy can be ‘partial’. Nonetheless, empirical analyses often end up assuming that countries are either ‘democratic’ or ‘nondemocratic’, and consequently overlook important aspects of regime change. Levitsky and Way instead give full attention to the grey zone countries in between. However, as will be argued, their conceptualization and explanatory account still suffer from important shortcomings.