Campaigns and Voters in Developing Democracies: Argentina in Comparative Perspective is an essential book in understanding voters’ choices, political elites’ behavior, and political parties in contemporary Argentina. The book makes three important contributions. First, it is one of the only volumes that departs from the assumption that the factors that drive voter behavior in advanced democracies also determine voters’ choice in developing democracies (see also Ryan Carlin, Matthew Singer, and Elizabeth Zechmeister’s, The Latin American Voter, 2015). The editors Noam Lupu, Virginia Oliveros, and Luis Schiumerini argue that the prevailing context of developing democracies—marked by a weak civil society, high levels of poverty and inequality, weak political parties and partisan attachments, and clientelism—leads to a different type of voter behavior from the one observed in advanced democracies. More specifically, the editors argue that in developing democracies, where few social identity groups are politically salient (due to a weak civil society) and partisan attachments are sparse (due, among other reasons, to the fleeting nature of political parties and their incapacity to ideologically distinguish themselves), voters place more weight on issue voting. They further assert that where policy issues are largely absent from political discourse, as is the case in most developing democracies, valence considerations and campaign effects play a larger role.

Drawing on the case of Argentina, the editors and contributors to the volume test empirically some aspect of this argument in each of the individual chapters. Taken together, the chapters reveal that voters in developing democracies are driven on election day by a different set of considerations than their US and Western European counterparts. By showing that this is the case, the book challenges the often assumed generalizability of a well-established theory of voting that draws its central premises on developed democratic systems. The book thus sets a new research agenda that emphasizes the need to build distinct theories of voting behavior for developing versus advanced democracies.

The richness of the empirical analysis is the second main contribution of Campaigns and Voters in Developing Democracies. The book is the first to test hypotheses using a one-of-a-kind survey, the Argentine Panel Election Studies (APES). The APES is both the first academic panel survey and the first election study ever conducted in Argentina. It was fielded during the 2015 presidential election and consisted of two face-to-face waves of interviews, one before the election and the other after it. The two waves helped trace the attitudes and preferences of the same individuals over time, thus allowing the contributors of the volume to test whether political, institutional, or attitudinal variables affect changes in vote intentions within the same individual longitudinally. By so doing, the contributors to the volume are well equipped to identify the causal mechanisms of those changes along the electoral cycle. The APES stands out not only because of its comprehensive temporal coverage and number of observations but also because of its cross-country research implications for studies of voter behavior. With the exceptions of Brazil and Mexico, Latin American countries are notorious for not fielding this type of panel election study. For the first time, the APES allows scholars of Latin America to make comparisons of voter behavior across the three largest democracies in this region. Two of the chapters in this book, those by Kenneth Greene and by Andy Baker and Dalton Dorr, are the first analyses of panel election data ever to be conducted comparing Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.

Its comparative scope is the third contribution of the book, and yet it might strike some readers as the least developed of the three. Taken together, the majority of the chapters rarely discuss the implications of their findings for the broader understanding of voter behavior in developing democracies. Moreover, the few chapters that explicitly engage in a cross-national analysis deal for the most part with descriptive comparisons about voter responses and electoral behavior, rather than with causal analysis, and they do not always leverage the comparative method to test hypotheses and draw causal inferences across countries. As a result, the reader can learn about the similarities and differences of voting behavior across Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico but cannot discern a generalizable theory that explains why voters in these three countries voted following a similar or dissimilar pattern.

So how did the Argentine electorate vote in 2015 when the center-right candidate, Mauricio Macri, defeated the center-left incumbent party led by Daniel Scioli? Building on the APES, the chapters in Campaigns and Voters in Developing Democracies tell us that valence considerations—that is, how incumbents performed—figured prominently among voters. General and particular economic considerations were critical influences on the vote (as shown in chapters written by María Victoria Murillo and Steven Levitsky; Lupu; Carlos Gervasoni and María Laura Tagina; and Schiumerini). There is an unequivocal consensus that Daniel Scioli lost the election because of the bad economic performance of his incumbent party. With regard to policy position, the chapters by Lupu and by Gervasoni and Tagina, find that policy preferences did not matter. With the exception of Greene’s chapter, there is agreement that Argentine voters did not vote for Macri or against Scioli based on their partisan platforms. Instead, weak partisan attachment allowed portions of the electorate to switch loyalties across the course of the campaign, as clearly demonstrated in the chapters by Ernesto Calvo and by Baker and Dorr; this weak attachment facilitated modest levels of strategic voting (chapter by Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro and Matthew Winters). Yet, campaign effects, as formidably shown by Greene, were substantial in Argentina. In fact, they were decisive: Greene finds that, were it not for the campaign, Scioli would have won the election. With a very innovative set of questions and strong causal inferential analysis, Oliveros’ chapter demonstrates that a sizable portion of the Argentine electorate distrusted the integrity of the election process. The mistrust was mainly triggered by suspicions of rampant vote buying. Finally, Zechmeister concludes the volume with a chapter that shows that individual-level cross-election volatility levels are higher in Latin America, particularly in Argentina, than in the United States.

These findings of how Argentine voters behaved in 2015 are important not only because they reveal that vote choice in developing democracies differs from that in developed democracies, but also because they turn on its head classic findings of voting behavior in Argentina (see Mora y Aurajo y Llorente’s El Voto Peronista, 1975). In so doing the book shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, voters in contemporary Argentina no longer cast their votes based on partisan affiliations or positional issues; instead they do so mostly based on valence issues.