Students of Latin American politics have long been troubled by the disconnect between policymaking and voter preferences, a detachment commonly attributed to a variety of circumstances—be they highly volatile parties that disappear around the time those elected on the party’s platform swear into office, presidents who shift their policy stances to the opposite end of the ideological spectrum once elected, or low legislative re-election rates that curtail retrospective voting, among other reasons. The institutional link between citizens and policies that political scientists often proposed, however, was in need of systematic empirical exploration.
Crisp, Olivella, and Rosas have written an incredibly ambitious book that is methodologically sophisticated and is presented in an elegant and unpretentious style that makes it accessible broadly. The authors posit that the links between voter preferences, politicians’ preferences, and public policies are institutional: the electoral system and the rules governing the policymaking process. They call the thread linking voter preferences to public policies the chain of representation, and over the course of 12 chapters, they identify and measure each of the components and effects of this chain with analytical strategies carefully designed to reflect the specific nature of politics in Latin America.
Ultimately, the book investigates the institutional conditions that favor quality representation in separation of powers systems. Organized into three parts, it analyzes, first, how preferences are expressed and can be measured; second, which institutions provide links between the instances in which preferences are expressed; and third, how to test the chain of representation. In all, the authors provide an assessment of the effects of different institutional arrangements on the way citizens’ preferences are translated into policy in the 18 countries that make up Latin America. They capitalize on preexisting data collection efforts, such as the AmericasBarometer and the LatinoBarometer, which measure citizen preferences; the Parliamentary Elites in Latin America Observatory, which provides measures of the preferences of legislators; and Lora’s 2012 measurement of policy outputs, which they expand and update using additional sources. These preexisting data allow Crisp, Olivella, and Flores to focus their efforts on placing observations on a common scale, the details of which they lay out in chapter 6.
The main contribution of their endeavor is to approach the chain of representation with a focus on the totality of the chain: from voters to policy, with representatives and institutions mediating the association. The book combines the presentation of intuitive assessments of Latin American politics with erudite research methods that build on recent methodological advancements made in political science to ultimately deliver insightful findings that are easily approachable.
Yet the book’s contributions are manifold, as it tackles conceptual and empirical issues that belong to different areas of political science: behavior, when seeking to address citizens’ and politicians’ preferences; and institutions, when seeking to assess the effects of electoral and decisionmaking arrangements. In each area, the authors provide smart estimation solutions. For instance, students of electoral systems will find chapter 7 and its tables most insightful, as the authors present the different systems in place across time and countries and provide a classification of each according to its strength, as derived from a simulation-based approach.
The authors’ flexibility to adjust to the full spectrum of institutional variation is a plus for analytical purposes and in terms of what their findings can contribute to comparative understandings on the matter. In this, the authors’ deep-rooted understanding of the region and its complexities serves the book’s purpose well. They ask, for instance, whether it is appropriate to derive conclusions from the preferences of the median voter or the median legislator when electoral systems implement proportional representation. This leads them to account for the full distribution of preferences at both levels. Nevertheless, they focus on the median voter when facing one-to-one congruence and responsiveness; that is, when analyzing presidential preferences. These decisions, which may seem ancillary, are fundamental to achieve grounded, accurate findings.
But the authors go beyond particular contributions to deliver a comprehensive account of the full chain of representation and ultimately to assess the quality of representation; that is, the congruence and responsiveness of politicians’ policy choices with respect to citizen preferences. In their strategy to tackle congruence and responsiveness, Crisp, Olivella, and Rosas posit that the chain of representation should enable tracking politician-to-citizen congruence and policy-to-politician congruence, and that as long as we can observe preferences and policy location over time, it should also enable capturing levels of politician-to-citizen responsiveness and levels of policy-to-politician responsiveness.
Therefore, a fundamental decision that truly boosts the book’s contribution is to place citizens’ preferences, politicians’ preferences, and policy in a common space. The authors measure preferences and policy on a left-right (state-to-market) continuum and maintain the same measurements throughout, so as to enable meaningful comparisons in terms of how policies, mediated by politicians’ preferences, ultimately represent citizens’ preferences. Although this decision follows common sense, it is technically elaborate to achieve. The book takes on the task, and in chapter 6 it delivers an exemplar in meticulous justification of measurement decisions and strategies reasoned to adhere to the authors’ theoretical resolve to approach the chain as such.
In part 2, the book lays the foundations that link congruence and responsiveness to the electoral system. This eases the reader into the next step, which is testing the chain of representation, a multilayered object, in part 3. Testing the chain requires making a host of research design and methodological decisions, and these are meticulously laid out and justified in chapters 9 to 11. Because any evaluation of levels of congruence and responsiveness requires a baseline against which to assess observed values, an outstanding contribution of the authors is to provide said benchmark through a simulations-based approach, just as they do with their characterization of electoral systems. This avoids assessing observed levels of congruence and responsiveness against optimal levels, which may not adhere to reality.
This decision is key in advancing toward their ultimate goal of shedding light on how institutional arrangements affect representation. In chapter 10 the book delves into the congruence and responsiveness of policies to policymakers’ preferences, and it shows that policymaking prerogatives that empower presidents tend to favor the president’s and the median legislator’s policy preferences, though they move away from measures of congruence focused on the distribution of preferences among legislators. This is an important empirical finding, one that speaks directly to questions often posed by scholars assessing constitutional rules allocating legislative decision rights. The book also shows that typical levels of congruence between policy proposals and executive and legislator preferences, based on the authors’ simulation exercise, occur approximately 0.4 percent of the time. This suggests that observed regional levels of congruence, close to 0.32 percent of the time, are not so low as we might otherwise believe.
Yet the book proposes that democratic accountability ultimately seeks to fulfill citizen preferences, and that these preferences reach policy through various mediations, each with its own biases. It is precisely the effects of institutional biases that the book unveils. Among its findings: electoral rules with very clear messages about the need to coalesce behind a given number of candidates, both those that are very constraining (majoritarian) and those that are very permissive (proportional), promote congruence between citizens and the legislators they elect. Presidents, on the other hand, are less inclined to share citizens’ preferences on the market-state continuum regardless of the rules that got them elected (lower congruence). Moreover, presidents with more proactive powers are better equipped to move policy in the direction they favor, making presidential lack of congruence all the more troubling.
Adding to these concerns, chapter 11 reveals that while simulated values of citizen median-to-policy congruence are about 0.62, observed citizen median-to-policy congruence in the book’s sample is approximately 0.5, suggesting issues of representation. Even so, citizen distribution-to-policy congruence is about 0.85 in simulations, and observed values fall within the simulated range of 0.9 and 0.78, though with a wider range. On a more optimistic note, the findings regarding citizen-to- policy responsiveness in the same chapter suggest a more optimistic scenario: observed levels of responsiveness are typically higher than simulated levels, even if with a broader variation range than expected, given simulation values.
Amid the book’s accomplishments, however, the reader may at times long for more anecdotal accounts regarding Latin American politics, to motivate and provide flesh to otherwise exact yet dry presentations of the ways the authors approach conceptual, empirical, and methodological decisions. Perhaps the final chapter might have provided examples of the book’s diverse findings, but I propose that examples, while useful to illustrate the dynamics at play, would not have added to the book’s contribution, which is to present regional trends and to show how institutional rules interact, often in complex ways, to affect policy outputs.
Regardless, the book is strongly grounded in Latin American reality. As I have highlighted above, political assessments are precise, and both presentation and analysis reflect the authors’ profound understanding of the region. I suspect that a presentation including more examples and anecdotes could have muddied the arduous task of writing (and reading) a book whose beauty is to provide overarching stylizations. Most interestingly, the book’s findings shed light on institutional choice, an achievement few books can claim to make.
