The primary goal of this unique and compelling book is to provide the theoretical and empirical foundations for what the authors hope will be a new wave of interest in the quality of democracy. At the heart of the book is a reaction against the minimalist definitions of democracy that in the past two decades have come to dominate not just the regime literature but also the democracy promotion work of a whole host of external donors in what Guillermo O'Donnell calls the East and South. While more countries have been able to sustain minimally democratic political regimes than early pessimists feared, the paramount failings of democracy nevertheless have been of growing concern to academics and citizens alike. According to the argument advanced in this book, understanding the performance of these new democracies—and identifying strategies for strengthening democracy—requires that we move beyond regime type “toward other spheres where political power is exercised” (p. 1). In much of Latin America, for example, political regimes experienced democratization while many of the state's authoritarian legacies were maintained more or less intact. In addition to conceptualizing democracy in a richer and more complex way, the book goes on to show how this more comprehensive view of democracy can be measured and evaluated, which it does by describing an actual democracy audit in one important Latin American case: Costa Rica.

The three-part organization is quite unusual for books that are published in political science. The first chapter presents O'Donnell's conceptual and theoretical work on democracy, exploring the strong elective affinity that he sees among the fields of human development, human rights, and democracy, each of which understands “the human being as an agent carrier of rights that define, and support, his/her very distinctiveness as a human being” (p. 62). In the second chapter, one of O'Donnell's former students, Jorge Vargas, explains the mechanics of a pathbreaking citizens' audit that he and others directed in Costa Rica, which resulted in part from ideas discussed in O'Donnell's seminar at the University of Notre Dame. The third section of the book is a collection of short and engaging essays written by leading Latin Americanists in response to various points raised in the O'Donnell and Vargas chapters.

O'Donnell is deservedly famous for a number of reasons, including work with Philippe Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead 20 years ago that questioned the importance of structural variables in the regime transitions then taking place from authoritarian rule. In The Quality of Democracy, O'Donnell argues that once we move beyond the political regime to look at democracy in other spheres, material conditions do become quite important, particularly when gauging the quality of any given democracy. “Being subject to physical violence, the recurrent fear of violence, hunger or malnutrition, serious preventable diseases, or severe inherited incapacities” (p. 60) all compromise the ability of individuals to exercise their political rights as citizens in a democracy. It is here that O'Donnell is able to borrow so fruitfully from a recent convergence in the work of human rights and human development experts, according to which the former are now emphasizing social and not just legal factors, and the latter are paying greater attention to human rights. Unlike the universalistic claims of most advocates of human rights and human development, however, he argues that the minimum sufficient set of rights or capabilities necessary to secure agency is “theoretically undecidable” (p. 178). Instead, this can only be decided by democracy itself.

In a less theoretical and more comparative mode of analysis, O'Donnell also identifies distinct sequences in the real-world acquisition of political and civil rights. Whereas civil rights were reasonably secure before the extension of political rights in the countries of the Northwest, in Latin America the sequence has been reversed. Well after the extension of formal political rights, the generalization of civil rights has yet to occur—consider, for example, O'Donnell's earlier work on authoritarian “brown” areas where the writ of the central state simply does not reach. Despite a less desirable historical sequence, however, he holds out the hope that political rights can be used to achieve other rights in the East and South, a strategy that feminists and minorities in the Northwest have used to great effect, and one that is simply unavailable in authoritarian political regimes. In a trenchant response in the third part of the book, Terry Karl offers a less optimistic view about the likelihood that political rights in new democracies will be sufficient to conquer other rights. According to Karl, the generation of a virtuous cycle between democracy, development, and the rule of law requires “systems of representation that actively encourage the political organization of the poor” (p. 192), particularly in those cases where democracy came about through elite pacts.

Although O'Donnell's theoretical contribution is what will perhaps bring most readers to this book, Vargas's description of the citizen audit is no less important and inspiring. Rather than applying a static set of criteria designed by experts, the audit used citizens' democratic aspirations as the departure point against which to measure actual democratic performance. Thus, the audit's designers convened a civic forum of 42 political, academic, and social leaders who, through a process of consensus, together devised the 33 “quality of democracy” measures that guided the audit. As Catherine Conaghan, Michael Coppedge, and Gerardo Munck argue in their contributions to the book, this inductive design raises important questions about how the audit could be replicated in other national and subnational units. These criticisms are well taken, and yet a more deductive approach emphasizing the problems that generally face Latin American democracies may well have failed to capture the particular experience of Costa Rica, widely seen as one of the region's most successful democracies, but one that nevertheless has its own problems (including abusive treatment of citizens by the state and obstacles to trade union organizing). Furthermore, the audit's broadly consultative and inductive approach—more than 4,800 individuals participated—certainly helps explain how the audit was able to function not only as a generator of new information about democratic performance but ultimately as a new mechanism of social accountability in Costa Rica.