This paper uses Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s celebrated model for explaining regime transitions to compare the competitive authoritarian orders of Chadli Benjedid and Abdelaziz Bouteflika that held power in Algeria during the mass protests of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the Arab Spring respectively to determine the ways and extent to which they were similar and different. Its objective is twofold. First, to see if the configuration of each regime influenced either the start or direction of these periods of protest. And second, to determine how the country’s authoritarian order has evolved over the past 25 years. In so doing, the paper makes two important contributions to the debate over authoritarian resilience in the region. In addition to interrogating the start of these protests in a novel way (by using Levitsky and Way’s thesis), it shows that Algeria’s authoritarian order is not static but continues to adapt successfully.