The message of this review is clear and simple: buy the book and read it. You will not regret it. You will learn more about the relationship between participation and democracy, you will come across a revised theoretical perspective on how participation affects individuals, you will read about the constitution-making process in Uganda, you will enjoy the impressive empirical evidence, and the conclusions may startle you. This book is excellent and fascinating—not just to Uganda experts, but also to Africanists and all comparativists.

Distrusting Democrats: Outcomes of Participatory Constitution Making focuses on key questions: How does mass participation affect political culture in countries undergoing political transition? Does participation lead people to invest or to disinvest in democracy? The book responds to those questions by examining the consequences of citizen involvement in the Ugandan constitution-making process. In a thoughtful theoretical overview, Devra Moehler tries to connect the twin debates about whether participation helps or hinders democracy with whether participatory constitution making is a panacea or a poison for democratic constitutionalism.

The theoretical literature on participation is old and lively, but also inconclusive and confusing. Scholars strongly disagree about whether widespread participation has a positive or negative effect on democratic politics or—alternatively—no effect at all. Classical liberal and contemporary participatory theorists are the optimists, and argue that political participation builds democratic attitudes, civic competence, and political legitimacy. Other theorists are the pessimists, however, claiming that mass participation not only polarizes and frustrates ordinary people, but also threatens political stability.

Although there is no lack of different theories on participation (see chapter 1), there are certainly not many empirical studies on its consequences, especially at the individual level of analysis. This book aims to fill this empirical gap by investigating the effects of citizen participation in constitution making in Uganda (chapters 3, 4, and 5). Moehler employs a multi-method approach that includes an original national survey of 820 Ugandan citizens, in-depth interviews and focus groups, primary materials from pubic and private archives, case studies of local nongovernmental organizations, and an analysis of media content. This study draws not only on extensive original data, but also provides valuable new insights into the link between participation and democracy at the individual level of analysis.

The empirical results indicate that participation contributes to the creation of “distrusting democrats”: citizens who are democratic in their attitudes, but suspicious of their governmental institutions in practice. Moehler's explanation for this finding is that participation in developing democracies gives citizens new tools with which to evaluate their imperfectly performing institutions. Moreover, she finds that citizens who were active during the constitution-making process were no more supportive of the constitution than those who stayed at home.

Still, no book is perfect, not even such an excellent study as this one. My main concern is the case selection. Uganda is not a democracy (as Moehler acknowledges herself; see, e.g., p. 6 and chapter 2), but a hybrid type of political system that combines democratic with authoritarian elements. A long-standing ban on political party activity was formally lifted only in 2005, while the study for this book had been done before this year. Human rights organizations have constantly mentioned Uganda's lack of democratization, including intimidation of the opposition, military interference in the courts and in parliament, and biases in campaign funding and media coverage. Although Moehler's findings can probably be generalized to the consequences of participation in nondemocratic hybrid regimes, further generalizations (i.e., to new and established democracies) are problematic. Hence, her claims that her study is about democracy in general (not only “democratizing countries” but also “democracy” and “consolidation of democracy”) may go too far. Moehler's study is on the impact of political participation on democratic attitudes in a hybrid political system, which is not even clearly democratizing during the period of her investigation (score of −4 on Polity Scale from 1995 till 2005, and “partly free” according to Freedom House). In this sense, the empirical findings and theoretical implications are quite limited, though still interesting in themselves.

Related to this concern, my second critique is that the book pays insufficient attention to the empirical results found in other countries. Table 1.1 includes information about some other cases of participatory constitution making (e.g., South Africa, Eritrea, Albania) but this is not a complete list. In addition, the book neglects a lot of cross-national empirical evidence on the gap between satisfaction and support. Ugandan citizens support democracy but are not satisfied; the author argues that this is good news, since it means that Ugandan citizens are critical of their regime; they clearly see its democratic deficits, and they want more democracy. However, in established democracies, there is a huge gap between satisfaction and support as well, which is largely ignored by the author; this gap probably asks for completely other explanations and other consequences than those in democratizing developing countries or hybrid regimes such as Uganda. In other words, the Ugandan evidence could have been compared more clearly with other cases; it would probably have shown that the impact of participation is different in different types of regimes, hence asking for different theoretical explanations, as she also suggests (e.g., p. 3) but does not investigate.

A third weakness of the book is that it claims to study change: how participation changes individuals towards more support for democracy and less satisfaction. However, the author relies on cross-sectional data and compares citizens' different levels of participation with each other. Panel data on individual attitudes before and after participation would have been ideal (as Moehler acknowledges in chapter 3), but now, the study is simply about the difference between nonparticipants and participants, and not about the impact of participation on change in democratic attitudes, as the author aims for and suggests.

Fourth, her empirical findings are somewhat puzzling, i.e., the fact that participation has a positive impact on democratic attitudes but no effect on constitutional support. Her explanation is that constitutions are difficult for citizens to evaluate, so they rely on political elites for information and opinions. However, this implies that the abstract concept of democracy is easier to assess, which is an assumption without clear evidence. Moreover, to predict whether participation will strengthen or weaken constitutional support, Moehler thinks that we must examine the messages that elites communicate to citizens about their participation, the process, and the resulting constitution. While this interesting alternative approach might explain the lack of constitutional support, it is unclear whether, how, and why elite information works as an intervening variable between citizen participation and democratic attitudes.

Finally, the conclusion is full of suggestions (chapter 6). Moehler states, for example, that the general implications of her findings are clear: there will be short-term risks of disillusionment and instability on the one hand, and long-term advantages from a more sophisticated citizenry capable of monitoring leaders and promoting political development on the other hand. The weakness is that most of those suggestions cannot be established based on this study. The study is based on analyses at the individual level of analysis, but the conclusion makes statements about the effects at a higher level. However, the strength of these suggestions is that they offer us many ideas for further research. This study is a perfect starting point for developing new ideas about the old issue of the prospects and pitfalls of participation.