In recent years, scholars have turned their attention to the role of antecedent authoritarian regimes to understand the many new democracies that have emerged around the world. This volume seeks to contribute to this discussion by introducing the concept of “authoritarian legacies” as a new analytic lens. The goal of the volume is specifically to show how a focus on authoritarian legacies offers fresh insights into the workings of contemporary democracies in Southern Europe and Latin America.

While the idea of authoritarian legacies is quite promising as a tool for structuring analysis, the concept also presents some important challenges. One challenge concerns its definition. In their introductory chapter, editors Katherine Hite and Paola Cesarini opt for an encompassing definition: “Authoritarian legacies are those rules, procedures, norms, patterns, practices, dispositions, relationships, and memories originating in well-defined authoritarian experiences of the past that, as a result of specific historical configurations and/or political struggles, survive democratic transition and intervene in the quality and practice of postauthoritarian democracies” (p. 4). This definition has the merit of including a broad range of phenomena that may carry over from the past, including phenomena that are altered in the process of the transition to democracy. However, one might legitimately ask if the definition is too broad. Does the definition include nearly everything from the past that negatively shapes the quality of democracy? What are examples of important legacies that are not “authoritarian legacies”?

Another key challenge concerns the role of authoritarian legacies in explanation. Because they are by definition remnants from the past that affect democracy, these legacies cannot be used to explain levels of democracy without risking tautology. Rather, authors must draw on authoritarian legacies as hypothesized causes of outcomes that are analytically separate from democracy (e.g., market reforms) or as outcomes to be explained (i.e., as dependent variables).

The substantive chapters roughly follow the editors' useful distinction of three types of authoritarian legacies: (1) formal rules, (2) specific actors, and (3) cultural practices. Much of the literature on old regime legacies has focused on the first category of formal rules, such as antecedent constitutional provisions, party regulations, and electoral guidelines that carry over to the new democratic era. Although some of the chapters touch on these kinds of formal rules, they are not the main emphasis of the book.

By contrast, authoritarian legacies in the form of concrete actors—especially the military and the police—are the focus of several chapters. Felipe Agüero argues that the strength of the military at the moment of democratic transition shapes long-run military–civilian relationships. For example, compared to Southern Europe, South America has not been successful at imposing democratic standards on the military. Agüero traces this difference and other variations within and across the two regions to the extent to which the military was able to control the transition process. Anthony W. Pereira and Mark Unger's nicely presented analysis of policing and the persistence of mano dura (iron fist) in Brazil and the Southern Cone argues that many problematic police practices developed after the transition to democracy, and thus that they are not authoritarian legacies. For instance, police atrocities such as corruption, brutality, and discrimination are often post->authoritarian developments. Better candidates for authoritarian legacies are long-standing institutional problems, such as the imperfect separation of the police and the military in much of Latin America.

Several of the chapters also focus on authoritarian legacies in the form of cultural practices, lived experiences, and psychological dispositions. These chapters often explore the degree to which cultural schemas are open to reconstruction by political leaders. For example, Cesarini emphasizes the role of agency when analyzing the first democratic leaders in post–World War II Italy and post-1983 Argentina. She argues that these leaders had considerable discretion in creating particular “myths of refounding,” and that these cultural myths in turn greatly influenced social memories, citizen trust in government, and the quality of democracy. By contrast, Consuelo Cruz suggests that Latin American democracy is impeded by a more deeply ingrained elite bias against political freedom. She argues “that the project of individual rights was postponed and marginalized in Latin America by historical rhetorical practices and discursive formations that privileged organic identities and paternal authority” (p. 316). This kind of authoritarian legacy, Cruz argues, can only be overcome through a basic transformation of Latin American culture.

In an excellent chapter, Frances Hagopian brings together a broad range of authoritarian legacies to explain the extent and timing of market reforms in South America. She puzzles over such questions as why Brazil was a laggard in economic reform when compared to Argentina, and why neoliberal reforms were not reversed in democratic Chile. Her answers stress the ways in which multiple political and economic authoritarian legacies shape the relative power and negotiating strategies of key actors, including both political elites and actors from civil society. One major finding is a suggestive negative correlation between the strength of the labor movement and the extent to which market-oriented reforms are pursued and maintained.

Overall, the volume succeeds at using comparisons to systematically describe how the past intervenes on the present. Indeed, all of the chapters are comparative, and most of them engage in broad and stimulating cross-continental comparisons. As a shortcoming, however, the volume is perhaps less successful at using the small-n comparisons to tease out causal patterns and actually explain major outcomes. This limitation sometimes manifests itself in the “kitchen sink” problem—that is, the inclusion of an unwieldy range of explanatory factors that are regarded as important. For example, Hite and Leonardo Morlino's otherwise interesting chapter on “good democracies” examines the effect of several contextual dimensions on authoritarian legacies, but ultimately concludes “that there is no necessary consistency between contextual dimensions and legacies themselves” (p. 73). Paloma Aguilar and Hite's thoughtful analysis of the sources of political justice in Spain and Chile arrives at a similarly open-ended conclusion, that “there does not seem to be one approach with sufficient explanatory efficacy that allows us to recommend it here” (p. 222). Even Hagopian notes that her analysis could be criticized for embodying a path of causation that “is too long and blurry” (p. 100). In this sense, the strength of Authoritarian Legacies and Democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe rests more with its comparatively informed and richly contextualized historical discussions than with its formulation of parsimonious explanations.