Aníbal Pérez-Linán has written an important book about the new dynamics of political institutional struggle in Latin America since the return to democracy in 1978. It contributes new insights to the old debates on presidentialism and parliamentarism and develops a comparative theory of impeachment. The book asks a general question: As military intervention recedes as an acceptable tool in the struggle among political elites for power, what other tools have emerged and what are their implications for regime survival? The answer is that presidential impeachment is one of those tools used when policy disputes emerge between political elites located in the legislative and presidential branches, and that this mechanism can change a government while protecting the democratic regime. Thus, we see the long cycle of survival of democratic regimes, combined with unstable governments, in the region since 1978.

Defining presidential crisis as an episode in which either the legislative or the presidential branch attempts to dissolve or change the composition of the other, Pérez-Linán examines 58 presidential crises over the period of 1950–2004. He concludes that while the incidence of such crises and the probability of a president being ousted from office remained stable over the entire time period, what has changed is that the ouster of elected presidents has not produced a concomitant regime breakdown in the recent democratic period since 1978.

The rest of the book focuses on only one direction of executive–legislative struggle—the proliferating attempts of legislatures to remove presidents through impeachment procedures or similar constitutional provisions. It examines in detail six cases between 1990 and 2004: the attempted or realized impeachments of Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela (1993), Fernando Collor in Brazil (1992), Raul Cubas (1999) and Lucho González Macchi (2001) in Paraguay, Abdala Bucaram (1997) in Ecuador, and Ernesto Samper (1996) in Colombia.

The author identifies and analyzes several common factors associated with the impeachment process. The first is that the military was unwilling or unable to intervene due to the new international and domestic context supporting democracy, and so political elites looked for alternative mechanisms, landing on presidential impeachment. Here, the author emphasizes the domestic context of democratization restraining military intervention, but fails to give sufficient weight to the evolution of international democracy norms, especially in the Western Hemisphere, and the policies of democracy promotion, both of which were strengthened after the end of the Cold War in 1990.

The second feature common to impeachments identified by Pérez-Linán is media exposure of scandals and corruption involving the presidential circle. These exposés help legitimate legislative attempts to remove a leader, even when legislators may be motivated by other policy disputes or political rivalries. Several trends in recent decades explain the media's greater attention to investigating and reporting presidential scandals, including the greater freedom of expression afforded by democratic governments and the greater competition arising from the technological advance of television, market deregulation, and reduced state control of newsprint and public advertising. Media conglomerates with financial independence were better able to confront the state, while a growing number of professional journalists were motivated to advance their careers by exposing public wrongdoing. Nevertheless, Pérez-Linán is not completely starry-eyed regarding the media's contribution to anticorruption, recognizing the limits of journalistic professionalism and the tendencies toward “declarative journalism”—publishing declarations of political rivals in lieu of hard evidence.

In turn, media exposés contribute to the third factor—widespread popular protest against corruption and unpopular economic policies that galvanizes the legislature to act, often in concert with military factions. A weakened president, in turn, seems to encourage a feeding frenzy among opposition politicians and the press in exposing scandal, further stoking public outrage. Yet public protests do not generally result in the removal of the president unless a broad, multiclass mobilization occurs, reassuring legislators of the general unpopularity of a president.

The fourth commonality of presidential impeachment is that the president fails to control a sufficient legislative coalition to fight back an impeachment attempt. Here, Pérez-Linán argues that the style of presidential relations with the legislature, in addition to the size of his partisan support in the legislature, influences his ability to create a “legislative shield” to block impeachment proceedings. Contrasting the “isolationist” styles of Pérez in Venezuela and Collor in Brazil, the “confrontational” styles of Cubas in Paraguay and Bucaram in Ecuador, and the “negotiation” style of González Macchi in Paraguay and Samper in Colombia, the author finds that even presidents with a majority or plurality in Congress who use an isolationist or confrontational style risk losing crucial support when presidential popularity recedes and open the door to impeachment. While the analysis of legislative support is obviously crucial for understanding the success or failure of impeachment attempts, the distinction between the isolationist (ignoring Congress and ruling by decree) and confrontational (refusing to negotiate) styles of presidential leadership is blurry and less helpful in the causal analysis.

Finally, Pérez-Linán carries out a broader analysis to avoid the problem of bias from selection on the dependent variable, conducting a qualitative analysis of 24 cases of presidential crises and a quantitative analysis of 75 administrations between 1990 and 2004 to include cases of noncrisis. This analysis confirms the expectations from the original analysis, noting the importance of broad popular mobilization in all cases of presidential removal and the importance of media scandals in spurring the legislators to action in the cases of impeachment.

The implications of the book's analysis are that Latin America faces a future of presidential crises, with periodic early removal of presidents, without regime breakdown. As the author points out, the role of legislators in providing a constitutional veneer to the ousting of unpopular presidents may preserve democracy, but it does not guarantee improved horizontal accountability that could prevent such presidential crises in the first place. Thus, we will see continued political instability.

Additional questions are raised by this provocative analysis, though not treated in the book. Constitutional crises seem to have proliferated in the past decade, including not only the legislature and the executive but also the judiciary in interbranch conflicts. Nonstate actors pose threats to democratic stability as well, not only the popular protests analyzed by Pérez-Linán but also illegal armed sectors, such as organized crime, armed militias, and guerrillas. Both of these trends pose particular dilemmas for international actors who could act as third parties to contain or resolve the crises, yet we have seen instances of positive international involvement in recent democratic crises, from the Organization of American States helping to resolve Nicaragua's presidential crisis in 2005 to the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) contributing to Bolivia's national dialogue in 2008. The role of international actors in helping attenuate presidential crises should be considered in explaining the various institutional outcomes.

In conclusion, popular uprisings leading to presidential ousters, whether characterized as “popular impeachments,” “popular coups,” or “civil society coups,” point out the need for democracies to consider citizen responsibilities as well as citizen rights. The Third Wave of democracy has enabled citizens to exercise their rights of assembly and dissent. However, there remains a need to better manage citizen expectations, enabling governments to communicate more effectively to citizens about the limitations on their room to maneuver arising from globalization, resource constraints, and political exigencies. This, combined with Pérez-Linán's call for more consistent horizontal accountability, will move Latin America toward a future of greater political stability and fewer premature ends to presidential mandates.