Matthew Rhodes-Purdy revisits the well-trodden path of regime support in general, and regime legitimacy in Latin America in particular, and manages to add new avenues for exploration. This is quite an accomplishment. He starts by identifying the following puzzle: there is a significant relationship between regime support and performance, but “there is [also] a great deal of unexplained variation” (3). What he means by this is that some countries exhibit anemic levels of regime support despite strong governmental performance, whereas others show an inverted pattern, with dismal governmental performance but high levels of citizen support for the regime. Chile is an emblematic example of the former, while Venezuela represents the latter.
To explain this puzzle, Rhodes-Purdy offers a reconceptualization of regime support that challenges David Easton’s explanation, which relies on direct experiences with the political system and socialization processes as the primary mechanisms buttressing regime support. Instead, Rhodes-Purdy contends that “how decisions are made is as important as the decisions themselves” (6). The feeling of ownership over the policy process is, the author argues, a dimension or attribute of “citizen autonomy,” and is a critical but neglected source of regime support. The author does not argue that “utilitarian concerns are absent from the minds of most individuals.” Instead, he claims that “opportunities for direct engagement with the political system have strong positive impacts on those citizens who live under regimes that grant them” (21).
A major theoretical contribution of this book is to bring the existing debate in political theory between liberal and participatory understandings of democracy into the conceptualization of regime support. The author argues that his main interest is “to test competing predictions made by liberal and participatory democratic theory regarding factors that encourage regime support” (222). To put it bluntly, liberal approaches would emphasize performance variables, whereas participatory approaches would pay more attention to the role of engagement in the policy process as determinant of this support.
Chapter 2 delves deeper into the concept of regime support and argues that it has two constitutive dimensions, “assent” and “approval.” Assent refers to “both the acceptance of the regime and an emotional basis of that acceptance” (35), while approval is related to rational calculations or assessments of regime performance (39). Neither dimension is more important, but their distinction is crucial because they help us solve the puzzle identified at the outset: “If assent is the more powerful determinant of support, and if approval shapes support only weakly or not at all, then the incongruence between performance and support ceases to be a paradox” (40).
The takeaway from this discussion is that focusing exclusively on performance considerations, and assessing how voters appraise that performance, is a misguided way of understanding regime support. That is why it seems paradoxical to see the contrasting cases of Chile and Venezuela. The author concludes that “it makes sense to shift focus away from those variables most closely associated with approval and turn to procedural characteristics that might directly shape legitimacy” (54).
Chapter 3 expands on the issue of citizen autonomy and the mechanisms of its generation, and the author identifies four: representation, participation, personalism, and charismatic attachment (79). These mechanisms are not mutually contradictory. This chapter also argues that Chile is a case of democratic elitism, whereas Venezuela exhibits participatory populism. The most important empirical prediction emanating from this chapter is that “perceived citizen autonomy is a crucial source of regime support” and that “citizens who believe themselves to be autonomous can weather economic storms that would otherwise sink them” (86).
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 provide the core statistical analysis. Chapter 4 offers a regionwide analysis using data from the 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2012 waves of the AmericasBarometer conducted by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP). Chapter 5 focuses on the Venezuelan case and employs data from the 2010 and 2012 waves conducted by LAPOP in this country. Rhodes-Purdy argues that “participatory populism, with its combination of authoritarian and democratic practices” (176), explains the high degree of regime support in this country. Chapter 6 studies the Chilean case and uses data from the 2012 Audit of Democracy carried out by the Center for Public Studies (CEP). This chapter also reports results from a lab experiment among 147 college students in two different universities. Rhodes-Purdy concludes that “elitist democracy” reduces citizen support for the regime. Using the experimental results, he shows that regime support can increase when respondents are given a direct role in decisionmaking.
As is usually the case in works that rely on survey data, carefully crafted theoretical arguments face significant challenges when they confront existing data that may not necessarily have been collected to test the proposed theory. It is here that one finds reasons to question some of the author’s methodological and conceptual choices. In fleshing out the idea of citizen autonomy, for instance, Rhodes-Purdy identifies two sources for it: representation and participation. While the concept of representation is largely unproblematic, involving accountability and choice, his treatment of participation is idiosyncratic. In his words, participation is “a mechanism for creating citizen autonomy; it is an alternative to representation, although I will argue that it can be used to evaluate many institutions and practices that are normally associated with representative democracy” (10). Furthermore, he argues that by participation he “does not mean the actual political behavior or engagement of any individual or group” but rather “a set of criteria for evaluating all institutions and practices occurring under a given regime” (13).
I must confess I remain unpersuaded by this construction of “participation” as an evaluative action rather than behavior. In the chapter devoted to the Venezuelan case, Rhodes-Purdy does include a measure of actual citizen engagement, participation in communal councils (168), as a predictor of regime support, and finds that it plays a significant role, “but only among those with strong participatory preferences” (168). By contrast, among those who do not exhibit strong participatory preferences, participation in community councils is negatively associated with system support. While the author speculates that this negative association may be due to dissatisfaction with operational problems in the working of these councils, I find this argument insufficient. Maybe their participation is an artifact of the regime. Some citizens may feel that they have no choice but to participate in these councils if they want to have access to important resources. If this is true, it suggests that participation in community councils may not be a choice for some, and therefore the impact of this participation on regime support may not be as conceptually straightforward as the author thinks.
In addition, Rhodes-Purdy operationalizes the concept of citizen autonomy as regime-based efficacy (63–64). But regime-based efficacy is operationalized as external efficacy (i.e., agreement with the statement that politicians care about what people think, and the belief that parties respond to the opinions of the people), as well as confidence in political parties (96). Even Rhodes-Purdy acknowledges that including trust in political parties as a predictor of regime support is “somewhat worrisome” (96). The risk is that it is a way of evaluating trust in an important component of the political system, and thus it is conceptually close to the dependent variable.
The use of external efficacy indicators is much less problematic in this regard, but I wonder if they are good proxies for the notion of participation that underlies the concept of “citizen autonomy.” An additional concern I have is that no effort is made to control for the degree of interest in politics as an independent determinant of regime support. This is an important omission because the theory rests in great part on the conceptual role that participation plays in regime support.
These are minor quibbles, however, for a work that offers a significant contribution to the literature. Even if the reader might have some misgivings about the possibility of empirically distinguishing “assent” and “approval” from the general notion of regime support, as the author himself acknowledges, the argument is well crafted and deserves serious attention. The book is particularly strong in weaving different strands of literature into a reformulated theory of regime legitimacy, and it shows the usefulness of seriously engaging the democratic theory literature in the understanding of mass public attitudes.
It is also particularly refreshing to see that the author does not fall into the trap that some students of Venezuelan politics have, which is to extol the virtues of participatory mechanisms as examples of “real democracy” while ignoring the undermining of liberal democratic procedures. Rhodes-Purdy does not gloss over the authoritarian traits associated with the participatory schemes that the Chávez regime has created. He finds that this participation enhances regime support, but he does not claim that the regime is democratic. He acknowledges that “participatory governance can exist outside a liberal democratic framework” (176). A timely reminder.
