This provocative volume extends Jorge Castañeda's thesis that two kinds of ‘New Left’ governments exist in Latin America, and that the moderate type is superior. The volume editors, Kurt Weyland, Raul Madrid and Wendy Hunter, define the moderate Left, represented by the Chilean Concertación and Brazilian governments under Lula da Silva, as prudent, gradualist and realist. The ‘contestatory’ or radical Left is exemplified by the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivian government of Evo Morales, characterised as ambitious, bold and activist. Country studies on Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile and Brazil supplement the more comparative introductory and concluding chapters. Thus the book is well ordered to support the editors' arguments by examining government policy output in these four countries. However, Leftist Governments in Latin America does not always evaluate government performance fairly or consistently.
The editors argue that moderate Left governments have performed better across the board. In politics, they maintained separation of powers and negotiated minor policy shifts with the established opposition, while the contestatory Left's successes with inclusion and participation are trumped by its sacrifice of ‘pluralism and liberal safeguards’ (p. 7). In economic and social policy, moderate left governments are judged more successful at ‘sustainable’ growth-with-equity. The editors see the radical Left's economic growth undermined by dependence on commodity exports, capital flight, and higher inflation rates. Venezuelan and Bolivian programmes to reduce poverty and inequality ‘rest on quicksand’, the editors say, because they are financed by commodity booms, insufficiently institutionalised and implemented too quickly. Moderate Left governments are deemed superior for having social programmes insured by fiscal surpluses, reserve funds and opposition consent.
Javier Corrales' study of Chávez's tenure in Venezuela echoes the editors' view that ‘contestatory’ Left governments undermine liberal democracy and long-term development. It documents concentration of power in the executive, restricted press freedoms, empowerment of the military and harassment of opposition leaders. However, the chapter ignores the opposition-organised coup against Chávez and how it may have motivated his political practices. Corrales casts doubt on the sustainability of recent economic growth and social programmes by showing that Chávez is repeating the oil-dependent, boom-and-bust cycles of previous Venezuelan governments. But Corrales' description of those earlier Venezuelan governments as ‘moderate’ undermines the argument that Chávez's oil-based policies stem primarily from radicalism or contestation.
The chapter by Evelyne Huber, Jennifer Pribble and John Stephens on Chile agrees with the volume editors that the Concertación governments under the Socialist presidents Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet qualify as ‘moderate Left’, and that moderation contributed to solid macro-economic performance, durable social benefit extensions and reduction in the political authority of the military. But the authors see significant shortcomings of the Concertación governments in terms of their failure to diminish inequities, increase labour skills and participation rates, or diversify the economy beyond primary-product exports. This last point also weakens the editors' association of a ‘contestatory Left’ with reliance on commodity exports. Huber, Pribble and Stephens also maintain that the Concertación's exclusion of many within their own parties, and its refusal to mobilise the grassroots Left, limited democratisation in Chile and weakened the Concertación's ability to confront right-wing obstruction of more progressive reform efforts.
Mixed backing of the editors' arguments is also evident in the book's two chapters on Brazil. Peter Kingstone and Aldo Ponce's chapter concurs with the editors that the moderate Lula administrations ‘performed well on the economic measures’ such as growth, employment and inflation. But they also argue that ‘Lula performed only tolerably on social policy measures and poorly on political ones’ (p. 104). Lula's social policies diminished inequality only marginally, while failing to reform deficient health and education systems. Lula's political practices ‘preserve[d] the institutional and procedural aspects of democratic governance’, but reinforced Brazil's patterns of corruption, exclusion and clientelism. The second chapter on Brazil even doubts that ‘Brazil … completed the necessary macro-economic adjustments to maintain … a long-term pattern of economic growth with social justice’ (p. 125). Instead, the authors argue that Lula consolidated a pattern of capital accumulation that hinders long-term investments in technological upgrades, human capital or productive schemes, which would generate formal-sector employment and domestic innovation. These changes, this chapter insists, can diminish Brazil's internal inequalities and external dependences significantly, while social compensatory programmes cannot. Lula's politics, in turn, forged a coalition of interests that impedes ‘this kind of structural change, [which] should be a central goal of any centre-left or left government’ (p. 136).
George Gray Molina's chapter on the Morales government in Bolivia shares the volume editors' concern that contestatory politics may undermine representation, weaken established institutions, and alienate producer groups whose cooperation is necessary for longer-term employment growth. Yet he finds that human development in Bolivia advanced through cycles of contentious and pacted politics, and doubts that major improvements transpire through negotiation alone. Gray's chapter reveals similarities between how Morales and Chávez handled political opposition, thus supporting the editors' view; but its description of social policies under Morales looks more like Lula's Brazil than Venezuela, and Bolivia's approach to controlling hydrocarbons industries, which greatly ‘increased the government's take’ without ‘expropriation or changes in property rights’ (p. 65), was akin to the strategy followed by non-leftist administrations in Peru. Gray cites Alain Touraine's claim that Morales' Bolivia represents a Left distinct from Chávez's Venezuela and Bachelet's Chile.
Despite the case studies' limited support for the volume editors' position, Weyland, Madrid and Hunter reiterate in the concluding chapter their argument for a ranked division between a moderate and a contestatory Left. As a result, they draw rather selectively on the book's case study chapters and otherwise rely on sources external to the volume. Although the conclusion is compelling in some respects, it also makes questionable methodological moves and debatable assertions. To reinforce the contrast between the two Lefts along the axis of economic diversification, the editors go back to Chile in the 1990s (p. 157), a decade when leftist presidents were not in office there. To cement the likeness between Bolivia and Venezuela, the editors attribute Morales' economic policy approach, more cautious than Chávez's, to resource constraints rather than prudent or realistic agency. They cite the ambition of Bolivia's 2006 National Development Plan and its limited hydrocarbons sector as evidence of radicalism constrained. But it is not clear how different Morales' approach is to that of Lula, defined as prudent and realist, in Brazil; Lula backed away from the radical elements of his party's agenda in a pre-inauguration communiqué when faced with investors' threats of flight.
There is, I believe, something to the editors' position that a government's ideology (or strategic orientation) drives its policies and accomplishments. I am not persuaded that generic and dichotomous representations of those policies and accomplishments are optimal. A less stringent argument and conceptual framework would also have allowed better integration and synthesis of the case material. Still, I highly recommend this stimulating book to scholars and students of Latin American politics for the high-quality reflection and discussion it will provoke.
