Devoting two chapters to each national case, Grindle marshals a variety of materials about how politicians and groups in civil society justified their positions regarding the need for and content of political reform. In Venezuela the decision was made to elect directly state governors (previously presidential appointees) and mayors (an office that had not existed previously). In Bolivia the Popular Participation Law made it more difficult for national officials to rely on patronage, and it formally recognized the citizenship and participation claims of the large ethnic population. In Argentina the government of Buenos Aires, where 10% of the population lives, was granted greater political autonomy, including increased control over its own financial resources and the direct election of its executive (previously a presidential appointee). To assess the consequences of reform, the author draws on the opinions of those involved and traces trends in partisan identification, voter turnout, and parties' electoral support. In addition to a brief summing up at the end of each case-oriented chapter, she provides a concluding chapter that explicitly returns to the hypotheses deduced at the beginning of the book.

Given the complexity of the issues, the research design employed, and the unwieldy nature of several key concepts, it is inherently difficult to make compelling statements about whether support was found for a particular theoretical approach. Regarding the motivation for reform, Grindle interprets politicians' willingness to decentralize in an effort to recoup legitimacy as support for a rational choice approach. The lack of mobilized groups who champion the cause of decentralization undercuts the usefulness of comparative institutionalism as an approach. A related lack of overt conflict among organized factions regarding the content of reform signals a lack of support for the comparative institutional approach in relationship to Grindle's second question. Instead, the relatively consensual design of reforms by specialists who are motivated by explicit critiques of existing institutions is taken as support for the transaction costs and principal-agent variants of new institutionalism. Grindle concludes that politicians and parties did alter their behavior in predictable ways after the reforms, which supports both rational choice and comparative institutional approaches. The case studies yield mixed results regarding support for both variants of new institutionalism because transaction costs and principal-agents issues vary across actors—some benefited from reforms, and others found politics more difficult.

Readers interested in decentralization and its contribution to the further democratization of already democratic regimes will find empirical details of great interest here. The case studies provide insights into the motivations of several types of actors. Although never formally conceptualized, the arenas through which they come into contact (the previously existing institutional designs) are covered in some detail. Grindle points out that history, including previous institutions, helps explain the problems that provoke reform and the diagnosis of those problems but not the content or timing of reform. One wonders whether a pattern would emerge with the coverage of more cases, more explicit conceptualization of the (historical) institutional features hypothesized to influence the content of reform, or consideration of additional types of democratizing reform (e.g., electoral reform at the national level). Grindle's point about the inability to explain the timing of reform seems particularly troublesome for comparative (historical) institutional approaches. Recent literature on path dependency and critical junctures is not get reviewed in Audacious Reforms, but the author's conclusion that we cannot systematically explain the timing of institutional change defines a challenge for institutionalists of all stripes.

Another challenge to scholars emerges through Grindle's accentuation of “leadership” as key to explaining many outcomes. For example, politicians decided to decentralize despite the lack of focused pressure from below to do so, and specialists played a key role in determining the content of reforms. How does “leadership” fit into the theoretical perspectives tested in this book? Grindle notes that comparative institutionalism might provide the most promise in this regard, leading one to wonder whether there is a relationship between leadership as used here and preference formation as discussed in much of the literature on institutions. Attention to preference formation is supposed to be a relatively strong suit of historical approaches, and it may be that the stress on leadership is nothing more than recognition of the importance of preference formation in a different guise. Yet, the seeming importance of creative leaders may simply be an artifact of the research design. In the book, the dependent variable, the adoption of decentralizing reforms, is held constant. If it were allowed to vary, we might find equally creative leaders in other countries who did not choose to pursue decentralizing reforms or who preferred to do so but failed.

In sum, Audacious Reforms takes on an important topic and assembles a rich array of case materials. Those with an interest in decentralization or politics in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Argentina will undoubtedly find this a rewarding book. Both explicitly and implicitly, the book is very thought provoking on larger theoretical concerns that will be of interest to a wider readership.