It is refreshing to find that a volume on Latin American legislative politics places legislative institutions and what happens inside of congresses at center stage. For a region regarded as dominated by overpowering presidents with outstanding agenda-setting power, the intricacies of its legislatures’ internal rules and procedures have received little attention from legislative scholars. The work’s main contribution is to highlight those institutions as much as the more conventionally regarded constitutional rules, and place them in conjunction with partisan and positional considerations to explain legislative outcomes. The volume does so with attention to the central role often held by presidents in Latin American countries, but the contributors are also careful not to flatten out variations in the effective role of executives vis-à-vis legislatures by overemphasizing presidential influence. The chapters analyze seven Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay.

As in other well-executed edited volumes, the introductory chapter provides a theoretical blueprint that guides country analyses. It does so by presenting an account of the dimensions that play out during the lawmaking process and the conditions under which these dimensions bear relevance. Eduardo Alemán and George Tsebelis highlight the role of the institutions that allocate decision rights within the legislative process, as they affect the congressional agenda and legislative outcomes. This itself is original in the Latin American context, where the literature still falls short of understanding the implications of different forms of internal institutional organization and specific procedures. Yet, importantly, Alemán and Tsebelis play down the effects of institutions and emphasize instead that partisan configurations and the positions (or preference location) of the relevant actors play out in determinative ways: They may reduce the influence of rules or grant them effective power to shape policy outcomes. I come back to this point later.

The volume provides an account of the interaction between policy positions and agenda setting with the aid of two graphical depictions of legislators’ policy positions in a two-dimensional policy space (Figures 1.1 and 1.2 on pp. 9–10). By alternating the actors with proposal power, a more peripherally located legislator A in Figure 1.1 and a more centrally located legislator E in Figure 1.2, they show how different agenda-setting rules (closed rule, open rule, and amendatory vetoes) affect legislative outcomes depending on the location of the status quo (pp. 10–12). This sheds an interesting light on partisan majorities and how they have the power to wipe out positional differences and institutional constraints, especially when congressional majorities are aligned with the president—an effect often confounded in Latin American politics with the irrelevance of legislative institutions per se. Likewise, Alemán and Tsebelis show that rules carry maximum weight precisely in the absence of cohesive majorities. Quite intuitively, they stress that across institutional variations (closed rule, open rule and amendatory observations), agenda setters located closer to the center of the policy space are more likely to benefit from policy outcomes closer to their own than agenda setters located more peripherally.

Earlier comparative work on the legislative process and interbranch bargaining focused on institutions and shed light on key rules that have the power to affect legislative outcomes. Alemán and Tsebelis nicely put together the accumulated knowledge, and move forward by identifying modes of influence over the legislative process, regardless of the actors that wield such influence, which vary by case. The editors group key institutional prerogatives into three spheres: a) the power to obstruct, that is, to preserve the status quo through gatekeeping (by controlling proposal rights or by deciding what is scheduled for floor consideration), and presidential vetoes (total and partial); b) the power to propose, that is, the power to make offers under a favorable environment: through amendatory observations, closed rule for committee proposals, sequencing prerogatives, executive decrees; c) scheduling power: by means of executive urgency, and authority over the schedule. They view these prerogatives as mechanisms that are brought to interact with partisan majorities and legislators’ positions, where their value is only verifiable in that interaction.

Alemán and Tsebelis also expect the “constellation of formal powers regarding proposal and scheduling prerogatives . . . to lead to different styles of presidentialism” (p. 23). This claim merits highlighting, as it places in perspective conventional characterizations of Latin American presidential systems. In a nutshell, Alemán and Tsebelis provide a guide to uncovering the conditions under which an otherwise moderate separation-of-powers system may concentrate influence in presidential hands. They offer indicators to disentangle apparent contradictions between strong formal prerogatives and moderate performance on the ground. Chile provides a case in point, as presidents concentrate extensive legislative prerogatives yet convey the idea to observers that presidential moderation prevails (as Alemán and Patricio Navia show in Chapter 4). Argentina provides another case, where presidential influence seems all-encompassing despite relatively weaker formal prerogatives (as Ernesto Calvo and Iñaki Sagarzazu show in Chapter 2).

Alemán and Tsebelis put forth a set of hypotheses that the chapters devoted to the country cases set out to explore. Country experts guide the reader through the institutional intricacies of each case, while also describing partisan and positional configurations. They read well one next to the other, assembling a valuable edited volume that transcends any loose collection of country-specific analyses. However, the significance of each country chapter in isolation is also worth noting. The country analyses go into sufficient detail concerning the institutional traits, political context, and partisan setting of the specific countries, such that each can be taken individually as an advanced reading on the determinants of lawmaking in that country. Regarding the empirical analyses, however, the volume may have done better in terms of the uniformity of the time frame analyzed in each country. While Calvo and Sagarzazu draw inferences from a sample that spans the 1984–2007 period in Argentina, and Aldo Ponce analyzes a full decade of bills presented in the Peruvian congress, other chapters draw conclusions from far more reduced samples and may raise concerns in this regard.

With its strengths underscored, one shortcoming of the work, which may affect conclusions regarding legislative outcomes, is its absence of a strategic understanding of lawmaking. After all, institutions provide incentives that legislative actors (the president, committee chairs, party leaders, backbenchers, and others) take into account. In response, legislators anticipate actions and decide their strategies in accordance with the incentive structure that confronts them. Yet this aspect of legislative bargaining is only vaguely present in the volume.

In sum, this edited volume is evidence of the advancement of Latin American legislative studies. It should be commended for enabling the contributors of the country chapters to reach balanced assessments regarding the nature and constraints of the lawmaking process in each case. As a whole, Legislative Institutions and Lawmaking in Latin America transcends the common sum-of-prerogatives approach to assessing actors’ legislative power, delivering instead a nuanced judgment of each country’s range of lawmaking possibilities: In order to prevail in the agenda-setting process, actors are subject to institutional, partisan, and preference-driven considerations.