Despite the relatively high profile of Colombia in recent years, Steven Taylor's Voting Amid Violence represents the most comprehensive single-authored book-length analysis of the Colombian political system written in English since Jonathan Hartlyn's influential The Politics of Coalition Rule in Colombia (1988). Given the far-reaching transformations of the Colombian polity over the past two decades, such an effort was clearly needed and will be of interest to specialists both in Colombian politics and in electoral politics more generally. General readers will also find much of value in the book, although some may be put off by the more technical discussions of voting rules and electoral reforms. Taylor covers a broad range of topics in this volume, including the nature of the Colombian political regime, its constitutional development over time, and to a lesser degree the contemporary violence that undermines the claim that Colombia is a liberal democracy. The heart of the book, however, is a focus on the Colombian political party system and its evolution in response to changes in electoral rules over time. This is clearly Taylor's strength, and his descriptions and arguments are clear and well developed, although occasionally not entirely persuasive.

Taylor begins with an extended discussion of the nature of the Colombian political regime, concluding that Colombia is best characterized as a more limited “electoral democracy” rather than as a full-fledged “liberal democracy.” Although his argument here is generally convincing, Taylor assumes the Colombian state to be a victim of external forces beyond its control, rather than acknowledging that elements of the state itself have constituted a significant part of the reason why Colombia is not a liberal democracy. Thus, while Taylor highlights the activities of guerrillas, paramilitaries, and drug traffickers, he avoids any significant discussion of the state's own extensive record of human rights abuses. Moreover, he conceptualizes the Colombian state as a homogeneous entity with a clearly defined sense of agency, asserting, for example, that Colombia “is an electoral democracy in search of status as a liberal democracy” (37). A more accurate view of the Colombian state is that it is a heterogeneous entity, whose constituent components have frequently worked at cross-purposes in terms of establishing a liberal democracy.

The heart of Taylor's book is aimed at reassessing and updating scholarship on the Colombian political party system. He begins by usefully critiquing the “crisis thesis,” that is, the tendency of scholars to view the Colombian political system as continually beset by crisis. Central to his argument is his challenge to the “conventional wisdom” that the rigid two-party National Front regime (1958–1974) was the source of much of the “crisis” of the traditional Liberal and Conservative parties. (Full disclosure: much of his critique is dedicated to contesting four claims that I have previously made—namely, that the National Front facilitated the depoliticization, increased fragmentation, increased clientelism, and decreased representativeness of the traditional parties.) Taylor is undoubtedly correct that not all of the deterioration of the Colombian political system in the 1970s and 1980s can be laid at the feet of the National Front; some claims are clearly overstated, particularly arguments that “the system was so exclusionary that violence was the only route opposition actors could pursue” (78). However, in my estimation, he swings the pendulum too far in the other direction, ultimately making the rather extraordinary argument that “the Front actually expanded representativeness in the Colombian state” (ibid., my italics) since its provisions for parity expanded the role of the Conservative Party more than its popular vote warranted, thus preventing the Liberal Party from dominating the state apparatus. Although Taylor reluctantly acknowledges that the National Front exacerbated the existing factionalization and clientelism of the traditional parties, he maintains that “there is no reason to assume that factionalization, clientelism, abstentionism, and the like would not have grown even without the parity and alternation requirements of the Front” (80). Taylor's insistence that the “rules of the game” instituted by the National Front had little discernible impact on the Colombian political party system is puzzling since his entire volume is premised on the idea that “institutions matter” (8), and that “alteration of the rules of the game can alter the behavior of political actors in the system” (2). Perhaps his stance reflects an unstated bias of the book: the rules of the game that really matter are narrowly defined electoral rules; other rules, formal or informal, pale in comparison, at least in terms of their effects on the political party system.

Taylor does provide an excellent description of the changes in electoral rules in Colombia from independence to the present, along with a persuasive argument about how recent changes have encouraged the transformation of the traditional two-party system in Colombia into the current multiparty system made up of several moderate-size parties. As a prelude to examining the impact of electoral rules on the political party system, Taylor addresses the difficulties in counting the number of distinct parties in Colombia. Here he focuses on the problematic issue of whether the adoption of an electoral label distinct from that of the official Liberal or Conservative party label is enough to qualify an electoral list as a new party (an issue of particular concern when analyzing the heyday of Liberal and Conservative party dominance). In general, if an electoral list adopted a label other than the official Liberal or Conservative party label, Taylor is willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they did indeed form a new party—otherwise, why would they be willing to forgo the benefits of the original party label? Nonetheless, the decision about whether a list belonged to a traditional party or not cannot simply be decided on the basis of a few preexisting rules about name changes. This is not to suggest that one should assume, as Taylor correctly notes that Colombia scholars frequently do, that once a Liberal/Conservative, always a Liberal/Conservative. However, the proper call about whether an electoral list “counts” as a new political party requires a profound knowledge of political developments at the departmental and even the municipal level, and cannot be made based upon simple ex ante rules, however neat they make the resulting quantitative calculation of the number of political parties.

Overall, Taylor presents an accurate description of electoral rules and their changes over time, and a particularly good analysis of the impact of recent changes (i.e., the 1991 constitution and the 2003 reform) on the political party system. However, his book never explains why the dominant Liberal and Conservative parties were willing to enact electoral reform in the first place, particularly given the ultimately negative consequences for the traditional parties that they presumably could have anticipated. In this sense, the volume could have benefited from a more in-depth contextual and qualitative analysis of the legislative and constitutional debates over electoral reform in recent decades (debates that, incidentally, were instigated by the widespread public perception that the traditional political parties were in “crisis” and, hence, electoral reform was necessary). Such limitations aside, this is an exceptionally thoughtful and well-written book, a worthy addition to the corpus of serious political analysis of the Colombian political regime.