Recent decades in Latin American politics seem like they have been on an ideological pendulum. After the neoliberal consensus of the 1980s and 1990s, the early 2000s witnessed a shift toward leftist presidents that came to be known as the “pink tide.” Yet studies consistently showed that this leftist turn had little to do with changing voter preferences and more to do with anti-incumbency: amid economic declines, right-wing presidents were ousted and replaced with their rivals. Since the mid-2010s, a new, if less uniform, wave of right-wing governments has similarly come to power on the heels of declining commodity prices. Once again, studies are showing that these ideological shifts seem to be driven predominantly by voters ousting incumbents for bad economic outcomes.

Many scholars have observed that people around the world vote on the basis of economic performance. This may be rational in contexts where national executives have a significant role in the country’s economic fortunes. But what about in countries whose booms and busts are driven predominantly by external forces, beyond the control of their own governments? Daniela Campello and Cesar Zucco have written an excellent book that tackles precisely this question.

Latin American economies depend enormously on commodity exports and inflows of foreign capital, binding their fortunes closely to international commodity prices and interest rates. As a result, national executives bear little responsibility for their country’s economic performance. Canonical theories about how democratic elections serve to select good representatives or sanction poorly performing incumbents imply that in these contexts we should find little economic voting. Because economic outcomes in Latin America are beyond the control of national governments, rewarding incumbents for good economic performance would amount to rewarding them for being lucky enough to be in office when international commodity prices happened to be high and interest rates happened to be low. Punishing them for bad economic outcomes would mean sacking them for the misfortune of governing during low commodity prices and high interest rates. But if timing is everything, then elections no longer serve their normative purpose of selecting good types and sanctioning bad ones.

And yet, as Campello and Zucco convincingly demonstrate, economic voting is alive and well in Latin America. In model after model, they show that the fortunes of Latin American incumbents are substantially determined by economic forces well beyond their control. Voters appear to misattribute the volatile booms and busts of their national economies to their national executives, a bias that manifests both in election outcomes and in more granular measures of presidential approval.

One could quibble about this or that measure in these regression analyses—such as whether index measures composed of different commodities ought to be disaggregated—or whether certain presidential transitions should be coded as incumbent reelections. But Campello and Zucco are admirably transparent about these decisions and regularly offer alternatives that yield similar results. No one reading The Volatility Curse will come away unpersuaded that, in Latin America, voters routinely punish and reward executives for economic outcomes over which they had no control.

The bigger question is what to make of this regularity. Campello and Zucco’s findings might be read less as part of the vast literature on economic voting and more alongside the growing body of research on voter reactions to exogenous shocks—occurrences like shark attacks, natural disasters, or resource windfalls. Scholars of elections care about these kinds of shocks because they are thought to be completely uncorrelated with the competence of the incumbents who happen to be in office when they occur—precisely the case Campello and Zucco make about the profound effects of international commodity prices and interest rates on Latin American economies.

Skeptics have noted that even these exogenous shocks might reveal information about the competence of political leaders. The onset of these shocks may be exogenous, but how a national government responds to them is entirely endogenous. The toll of a natural disaster depends enormously on the nature of the government response (certainly the pandemic has confirmed as much). The economic effects of resource windfalls are similarly a function of the government’s distributive efforts (one of many reasons why oil windfalls did not have the same effect in Norway as in Venezuela). If the same is true of the volatile exogenous shocks that so shape Latin American economies, then economic voting in these contexts may not be so problematic for our theories. Although Campello and Zucco favor the parsimony of their explanation of misattribution bias, we must grapple more fully with these alternatives if we are to understand the implications of their findings for theories of representation.

The reading Campello and Zucco prefer is that their findings imply that voters do not behave in the rational way that formal models of democratic representation would have us believe. Through a series of survey experiments, they show that the misattribution bias they document is not simply the result of lack of information but is hardwired into the way some individuals evaluate incumbents and the psychological blinders that come from affective attachments to political leaders. These nonrational determinants of vote choice will come as no surprise to most behaviorialists. But one powerful implication of The Volatility Curse is that our normative theories of representation have not kept pace with our understanding of political psychology and behavior.

For Campello and Zucco, the fact that voters do not conform to our theories helps explain some of Latin America’s political pathologies. Because political leaders know that their political fortunes are outside their control, they behave differently in office. Certainty about electoral outcomes allows those governing in boom times to siphon off resources for themselves and their cronies with no fear of accountability. Perversely, it also reduces the incentives for incumbents certain of their defeat to cater to public demands. These are important insights, ones that merit further analysis beyond the examples provided in chapter 8. But such an analysis is not easy. Latin America is well known for the weakness of its democratic political institutions, making it difficult to demonstrate that these unrepresentative elite behaviors are truly driven by the unique economic environment. Moreover, although consistent cases exist, there are also many cases in which incumbent politicians expend enormous time and resources running for reelection despite their economic misfortunes. And perhaps not wholly irrationally: Alan García returned to Peru’s presidency two decades after overseeing a massive economic collapse.

Like the best books, The Volatility Curse offers new insight into the political economy of elections while also raising novel questions for future work. Its findings speak most directly to those interested in the political economy of Latin America, but its impact will be felt among a broader set of scholars seeking to better understand elections, economic shocks, and both the theory and practice of democratic representation.