Peter Smith set out to write a textbook and ended up compiling an original database of Latin American democracy from 1900 to 2000. Analyzing a century of democratic change, Smith has written an impressive book that is accessible to undergraduates, a great literature review for graduate students, instructive for policymakers, and a significant contribution to scholarly understanding of a complex phenomenon. All of this is done with a lively and jargon-free writing style.
The central theme of the book is that Latin American democracy will endure now because it is safe, but it will endure in a shallow and illiberal form. Smith identifies three cycles of democracy in the twentieth century: the incipient early cycle with four countries (1900–1939); the second cycle adding nine countries (1940–77), and the third cycle adding six more (1978–2000). In contrast to the tumultuous second cycle, when popular representation (and demands) expanded rapidly, threatening established interests and causing backlashes of military authoritarianism, the current third cycle is a “tamed” democracy, resting on negotiated transitions, moderate ideology, and restricted representation. Illiberal democracy is the most pervasive form, reflecting restrictions on freedom of expression and dissent, and police repression. The author expects this form to continue particularly in the more hostile (to democracy) international environment following 9/11.
Like Adam Przeworksi et al. (Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 2000) and Larry Diamond (Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation, 1999), Smith adopts a subminimalist definition of democracy based on free and fair elections. He then creates four regime types: a) electoral democracy with free and fair elections; b) electoral semidemocracy in which elections are free but not fair (that is, contestation is open, but incumbent manipulates the results) and/or elections are free and fair but the winners do not wield effective power to govern; c) competitive oligarchy in which participation is limited to elites; and d) nondemocracies, or everything else.
Smith then adds the rest of Robert Dahl's “procedural minimum” by addressing rights and freedoms as a separate variable that, taken together with the electoral dimension, produces a set of configurations of political democracy. Through this analysis, he breaks down the electoral democracy regime type into two subtypes: liberal democracy (extensive guarantees of civil liberties) and illiberal democracy (partial or minimal guarantees of civil liberties).
Every author must decide on a set of criteria to define and measure his or her main concepts, and then apply those empirically. Smith clearly defines his categories, admits subjectivity in his application to certain countries and borderline cases, and does an admirable job in presenting his data in easy-to-read graphs and charts. My quibbles have to do with his conceptualization, application to specific cases, and minimalist writing style that causes confusion in some instances. First, while it is analytically useful to separate the two dimensions of elections and rights in order to assess the relationship between them, it is also difficult to imagine how a government could conduct free and fair elections without protecting certain minimal rights before and during an electoral event. Restrictions on the press and access to the media fundamentally affect the quality of elections, yet here are counted as a separate variable under “quality” of democracy.
The problem with the criteria is evidenced in the cases themselves. Smith does not provide us with the rationale for individual assignments, and so we have to glean it from occasional side references, or not at all. For example, Venezuela is moved from electoral democracy to semidemocracy in 1999 in Smith's classification, but why? The 1998 elections bringing Hugo Chávez to power were transparent, and the new government's dominance of the constituent assembly elected in 1999 was due to the disorganization of the opposition rather than manipulation of the vote. We get a glimpse of his criteria on p. 160 when Chávez is deemed to have convened a constitutional convention “of questionable legality” and page 175 where Chávez is alleged in 1999 to have “succeeded in disbanding the incumbent legislatures.” Yet neither of these has to do with the subminimalist criteria of elections per se, and at any rate, are open to interpretation.
Likewise, we could ask why Nicaragua was considered to be an electoral democracy still in 2000 after a pact between the two major parties severely restricted the ability of third parties to contest for office, or why Chile is put in the loftiest category of liberal democracy when the elected officials did not fully govern, given the reserved domains still in effect from the Pinochet years.
The third quibble has to do with the writing style and clarity. References to electoral democracy get dropped to just “democracy” in some instances, presumably for editorial reasons, yet the residual category of nondemocracy (autocracy) means that the intermediate categories of oligarchy and semidemocracy are also included in the broad category of “democracy” at times, resulting in some confusion. An alternative interpretation would place semidemocracy into a category of electoral authoritarianism, reflecting the judgment that if the minimal criteria of free and fair elections are not met, then the regime does not qualify as any kind of democracy.
The bulk of the book analyzes historical change, institutional issues, and the quality of democracy in the contemporary period, using not only the original data set but also extensive analysis of preexisting data sets on electoral variables, economic and social dimensions, and civil liberties and public opinion. These chapters are most useful for students, providing excellent summaries of historical trends and theoretical developments. Some of the chapters rely on the perspectives of particular authors, such as the transition chapter following closely the Transitions from Authoritarianism series (Laurence Whitehead, Guillermo O'Donnell, and Philippe Schmitter) and the freedoms and rights chapter adopting the conceptualization of Fareed Zakaria in “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 76 (November/December 1997): 22–43. Some appreciated surprises emerge, though, in the fascinating case studies of the parliamentary debates in Chapter 5; the interesting data analysis in Chapter 8 of political regime type and social welfare and policy performance; and the excellent capsule histories of labor, women, and indigenous movements in Chapter Nine. The boxes explaining terms, methods, and case studies are also a useful pedagogical tool.
A welcome epilogue analyzes trends from 2001 to 2004 and highlights the impact of the post-9/11 world focus on security. The book concludes that although electoral democracy has grown over time, its shallow and illiberal nature is likely to persist for some time, precisely because it is less threatening to elite interests. With a somewhat unsatisfactory cursory treatment of possible scenarios, Smith also points out that liberal (full) democracy is not protected from erosion to illiberal democracy or even semidemocracy, and that illiberal democracy is neither an inevitable stepping stone to liberal democracy or a guaranteed bulwark against autocratic rule.
