Fatton traces Haitian politics from the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier in February 1986 through Aristide's second inauguration in 2001 and the coup attempt that December. His argument is that liberal democracy rests on a balance of power between a bourgeoisie and an organized working class, and that where neither is strong, elections yield what he calls predatory democracy, in which constitutional limits and a free press coexist with a brutal scramble for the few offices that give access to wealth. Because private routes to money are scarce, politics becomes an entrepreneurial career, and honest people are turned into officeholders who devour public resources. The book takes direct aim at a democratization literature that equates regular elections, elite pacts and market reform with consolidation. Evidence comes largely from secondary scholarship on the Lavalas years, supplemented by Fatton's own knowledge of the Haitian elite he was born into, whose private contempt for the poor he reports firsthand.