In this book, Kurt Weyland builds on his previous argument that the spread of social sector reform policies across Latin America can be explained best by national policymakers relying on a series of biases and heuristics, rather than on rational assessments of all available information. To support this claim, he develops in-depth case studies of pension reform and health reform based on extensive interviews with policy elites across Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Peru. The book is compelling not only for its strong support for the main thesis but also for the way it brings together and advances the literature on three major debates in political science—the nature of policy diffusion, the value of bounded rationality as a counterpoint to rational choice theory, and the politics of social policy reform.

Recent work on policy diffusion has sought to uncover the mechanisms behind the spread of policies from one government to the next, often with normative implications. For example, learning is thought to be a beneficial mechanism through which past experiences are used to formulate better policies for the future. Competition across governments, however, can lead to a detrimental form of policy diffusion, often characterized by a race to the bottom. Imitation—the copying of another country's policies without critical assessment in order to appear as modern as that country—is likewise seen as not particularly attractive. And coercion of policy choices by another government or international organization, while perhaps helping to overcome domestic political constraints to better long-term outcomes, can also have extremely adverse consequences.

These mechanisms are implicitly embedded in Weyland's own view of policy diffusion (Chapter 2), and the case studies show which mechanisms are at work in Latin American reform efforts. For example, after examining how international financial institutions may attempt to coerce countries toward particular policy choices, Weyland ultimately concludes that they exert insufficient influence to significantly constrain policymakers' wide degree of latitude, especially over social security policy. By far the mechanism receiving the greatest focus, however, is learning. Here, the author's contribution has serious normative implications. Contrary to the often assumed rational learning model, Weyland proposes an alternative of bounded learning, wherein policymakers rely on the cognitive heuristics of availability, representativeness, and anchoring. Both individually and collectively, these heuristics lead to the importation of often inappropriate and ultimately problematic policies from neighboring countries. By confronting even the most normatively appealing mechanism of policy diffusion, his work challenges the more optimistic view of policy advancement over time based on shared experiences.

In making this argument about cognitive shortcuts replacing rational learning, Weyland positions himself in the middle of another ongoing debate in political science—that between rational choice theorists and advocates of bounded rationality. This debate is too often joined by those who characterize the opposing side in far too negative a light. Opponents occasionally portray rational choice theory as rigidly assuming self-interest with no concern for others, perfectly informed decision makers, and an unbounded ability to find the optimal path to achieve clear and unchanging goals. Opponents will then set themselves against rational choice theory, rather than in support of a well-specified alternative. On the other side, advocates may simply argue that the tools of rational choice—such as game-theoretic modeling—can be adapted to include regard for others, changing goals, search costs to overcome limited information, and so on, often to the vacuous conclusion that assumptions can be modified to fit nearly all political behavior.

To move the debate forward, it is essential to overcome these biases, to note the benefits of multiple approaches, and to characterize when and where each approach is valuable in political science research. Although Weyland does not redefine the debate along all of these lines, he does avoid many of the pitfalls of rational choice opponents. This book, therefore, can serve as a model for moving forward with a bounded rationality theory on its own terms, as opposed to simply contrasted against the dominant paradigm. While he may portray too rigid a view of rational choice theory for many readers, Weyland is quite clear in laying out an alternative. Rather than weighing all relevant information, policymakers in his theory rely on the most vivid and “available” examples. Decision makers excessively extrapolate and see as “representative” even quite limited evidence. And they “anchor” their views to initial, and often arbitrary, positions. Moreover, the degree to which policymakers rely on these heuristics, in his view, depends on the complexity of the policy being chosen and the decision-making capacity of key policy elites.

It is not immediately clear whether these arguments and their support will win converts to the bounded rationality school of thought. For example, where Weyland sees an availability bias in the spread of policies across neighboring countries, a rational choice scholar may see learning from suitably similar experiences. Where he finds a bias toward drawing excessively confident conclusions from limited early experiments, rational choice scholars may find optimal decisions based on uncertainty. And those who oppose rational choice scholars' treatment of governments as individuals may likewise criticize Weyland's use of individual-level cognitive heuristics to describe government-level policy decisions. Nevertheless, by carefully laying out competing hypotheses and illustrating the use of cognitive shortcuts among top policymakers, he sets the terms for future scholarly debate.

While I focus here on the methodological approach and contributions to important scholarly debates, the substance of the research on pension and health reform across Latin American countries merits a review in its own right. Readers interested in the ins and outs of reform politics, of elite decision making, and of the power of perceived expertise will not be disappointed. Here, Weyland's qualitative approach has the payoff of accounting for nuances too easily missed in large-scale quantitative analyses.

In sum, by contributing skillfully to important substantive and methodological debates, Bounded Rationality and Policy Diffusion merits a place both on the desks of a wide range of scholars and in the hands of practitioners concerned about how to draw lessons from the policy experiences of others. Notably, this work is also of pedagogical value on graduate syllabi, where it can serve to generate lively and informed debates about qualitative versus quantitative studies of political science, about rational choice versus bounded rationality, about policy diffusion, and about reform politics.