Institutional weakness in Latin America has been both pervasive and understudied. Most research on politics in the region acknowledges its institutional instability, its lack of law enforcement or both. Yet, although this problem is tacitly present in most research, few studies have addressed it in a direct manner. The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America does that. Leveraging path-breaking research on bureaucracies, constitutions, legislatures, presidents, elections, subnational politics, participatory institutions, and land, women’s, and environmental rights, this edited volume conceptualizes institutional weakness, creates a typology and expectations to explain said feebleness, and provides a comprehensive and nuanced analysis of manifestations (or unexpected absences) of these different flaws across Latin America.

Focusing on formal institutions, the editors Daniel M. Brinks, Steven Levitsky, and María Victoria Murillo in the introduction conceptualize institutional weakness as the difference between a pre-institutional and an institutional outcome. Emphasizing what institutions accomplish or fail to accomplish (vis-à-vis what would have happened in their absence), they take into account both how ambitious institutions are and the extent to which they achieve that ambition. Strong institutions set nontrivial goals and achieve them (even if at a lower degree than originally expected); weak institutions either set trivial goals or set nontrivial goals but fail to achieve them.

Based on this conceptualization, Brinks, Levitsky, and Murillo identify three types of institutional weakness: insignificance, noncompliance, and instability. Insignificant institutions set trivial goals. They may achieve their objective, but the outcome does not change significantly with or without the institution. Significant institutions set nontrivial goals. They are weak if they are unstable (i.e., they change often and in disparate directions) or if they are ignored/disobeyed and thus fail to change behavior. The book focuses mostly on these last two categories.

The editors’ theory of institutional weakness is intrinsically related to political support. Those who oppose a significant institution have three options: comply, fail to comply, or change the institution. If the penalty for noncompliance and the cost of reform exceed the cost of the institutional outcome, the editors expect institutions to be strong. If, on the contrary, the penalty for noncompliance or the cost of change is lower than the cost of the institutional outcome, they expect institutions to be weak. Chapters 2–11 illustrate and refine these expectations, sketching how different mechanisms lead to different types of institutional weakness or strength.

Chapters 2–4 concentrate on instability: they analyze how economic, electoral, or cyclical institutional instability decreases the support and/or the value of institutions, reducing the cost to replace them. Chapters 2 (by Ernesto Calvo and Gabriel Negretto) and 4 (by Gretchen Helmke) show how electoral volatility, weak checks, and presidential crises can trigger rule change and foster institutional instability. Chapter 3 (by Michael Albertus and Victor Menaldo), on the contrary, illustrates how strong economic performance and the political survival of rule writers can hinder rule change and promote institutional stability.

Chapters 4–9 focus on noncompliance. They highlight how electoral incentives, societal pressures, state capacity, and proximate interests shape enforcement—and thus—the cost to obey. Chapters 4, 5, 8, and 9 focus on non-enforcement (forbearance). They highlight how state officials neglect laws in order to avoid electoral costs (chapter 5 by Alisha C. Holland) or enforce them selectively based on distributions of de jure and de facto powers (chapter 4), ideology (chapter 9 by María Paula Saffon and Juan F. González B.), and immediate interests (chapters 8 and 9). Chapters 6 and 7 focus on state (in)capacity and societal resistance. Dialoguing with the chapters listed earlier, they analyze how these variables can interact to produce other types of (non)compliance—like proactive and stand-offish enforcement (chapter 7 by Matthew Amengual and Eduardo Dargent)—or short-term defiance, while the institution lays the groundwork to change social norms in the long term (chapter 6 by Mala Htun and Francesca R. Jensenius). Lastly, chapter 8 (by Belén Fernández M. and Candelaria Garay) analyzes how subnational actors can influence rule-writing processes to produce yet another type of enforcement: nonpunitive enforcement.

Chapters 10 and 11—by Andrew Schrank and Tulia G. Falleti, respectively—discuss unlikely strong institutions. They show how even institutions designed to be ignored (i.e., window-dressing institutions) or that are initially ill equipped to succeed can grow stronger if external monitoring, invested bureaucracies, and politically incorporated social actors raise the costs of violation or change.

Institutions are one of the most theoretically and conceptually elusive topics in political science. They are endogenous, hard to define, and hard to operationalize. This book tackles all of these problems with theoretical depth and empirical breadth. Although plenty of literature discusses institutional weakness (e.g., see Scott Mainwaring, Party Systems in Latin America, 2018; Javier Corrales, Fixing Democracy, 2018; or Yanilda González, “The Social Origins of Institutional Weakness and Change,” World Politics, 71(1), 2019) and we have a good idea of how it looks, this is the first attempt to conceptualize it in a way that accounts not only for ambition and survival (often misleading indicators of strength) but also the extent to which it actually changes behavior. With this innovative framework of what institutional weakness is, how it manifests itself, and under what circumstances it does so, this book sets a research agenda that had been, until now, present but silent in most works on Latin American politics.

Although conceptualizing institutional weakness is the most important contribution of the book, it is not the only one. This volume is also empirically comprehensive. Even though five chapters draw extensively from previous published work (chapters 3, 4, 5, 8, and 11), the editors and contributors do an excellent job connecting these somewhat disparate sets of research around a common theoretical background. Unlike other edited volumes where contributions merely illustrate a theory or concept, the chapters in this book connect and build on each other, enriching and shaping the framework proposed at the outset of the volume.

Because of its theoretical richness, The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America also raises important and exciting questions. Parts of the conceptualization invite refinement. Institutional cost, for example, is defined as equal but also as affecting institutional strength (p. 24), muddling the excellent conceptualization of institutional weakness put forward in the book, as well as the expectations of how it emerges. If the institutional outcome is the result of different levels of significance, instability, or compliance, how can that same outcome be the parameter that actors use to decide whether to obey or change the institution in the first place? Future scholars should look more closely at these different terms and perhaps discuss in more detail the relation between expected and de facto institutional outcomes, as well as their impact on actors’ calculations.

The different types of institutional weakness invite more research as well. The book spent very little time discussing insignificant institutions, which have gained relevance in light of the new processes of institutional weakening discussed in the conclusion. As the editors point out, originally strong institutions can become insignificant as social norms adjust to them. Can the opposite happen as well? Can formerly insignificant institutions acquire relevance if social norms change? Institutional weakening has entailed the erosion of informal institutions. Until recently, for example, rules pertaining to the transition between incoming and outgoing administrations in the United States were insignificant. Will they become more relevant in the face of challenges to informal norms that dictated concession and turnover? And if so, are actors likely to comply, fail to comply, or change them? Does that mean we should think of institutional strength less linearly and more dynamically?

These questions show the promise of The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America. It is an agenda-setting book, with important theoretical and empirical contributions that are key to better understand politics in the region and elsewhere.