Focused in scope yet broad in its implications, Brett J. Kyle’s book contributes fresh insights into democratic consolidation among countries recovering from dictatorship. Kyle’s research explores the postauthoritarian political landscape for former members of military regimes across Latin America. Specifically, he puts forth a theoretical framework that explains the conditions under which ex–military regime leaders compete as presidential candidates under democracy.
A stylized understanding of third wave democratization suggests that military dictatorship is more likely to give way to democracy gradually, with regime leaders in an institutional position to negotiate the terms of the transition (see Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, 1993). Even as regime leaders concede to liberalization, the military government is able to use its leverage among sympathetic elites to secure the long-term interests of the military before elections. This contrasts with the experience of single-party regimes, such as the PRI in Mexico, which instead give way to democracy when both elite patronage networks and mass voter support break down due to the declining “performance legitimacy” of the government (see Beatriz Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and Its Demise in Mexico, 2006).
However, the conditions of democratization are quite a bit more complex in reality than top-down or bottom-up accounts, as is any careful account of the electoral landscape that emerges in the wake of dictatorship. By systematically exploring a new unit of analysis—candidacies by former military regime elites—as well as the historical role of democratic development before dictatorship, Kyle’s work contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of postauthoritarian electoral politics.
Kyle takes a bold risk by engaging with the wealth of scholarship on postauthoritarian politics in Latin America. The book explains variation in the performance of former members of military regimes, or “recycled dictators,” in elections during and immediately following democratic transition. Kyle shows how two key conditions—democratic continuity and the level of uncertainty among ex–regime members—interact to predict the presence of ex–regime members in elections. For instance, in countries with more stable party systems before dictatorship (high continuity), and where the regime secured its interests before the democratic transition (low uncertainty), recycled dictators are less likely to compete electorally. Examples are Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Peru. Alternatively, where democratic continuity is low and where military interests are threatened by civilian control, ex-regime candidacies are likely to be a permanent feature of electoral competition, as in Panama, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Kyle creates a new typology for understanding the specific attributes of candidacies under varying configurations of democratic continuity and ex–regime member uncertainty.
The scope conditions of his theory extend to 12 countries in Latin America. In addition to a rich array of descriptive data in the opening chapters and backmatter, Kyle leverages four historical case studies to support his argument. I particularly appreciated his selection of Argentina (chapter 5) and Chile (chapter 4) as examples of countries with high democratic continuity punctuated by a period of military dictatorship, with variation in the level of uncertainty the outgoing regime faced. In Chile, the Pinochet regime managed to secure its interests during its time in power. Conversely, the Argentine military junta failed to win a similar set of guarantees from nonmilitary political elites, and thereby faced an ongoing threat of transitional justice proceedings under the new civilian government. These cases demonstrate the different incentive structures facing ex–regime members and how these incentives shape the presence and motivation of recycled dictator candidacies. In the case of Argentina, for instance, ex–regime members compete electorally as “protest candidates” in order to challenge attempts to prosecute military officers complicit in human rights abuses.
The case studies provide several lessons from the experience of democratization following military dictatorship. For one, the Chile and Argentina cases offer important insights into party survival under dictatorship that are not explicitly theorized in the opening chapters. Even under regimes that did their best to abolish political parties through coercive means during their rule, party organizations managed to survive via mobilization by exiled leaders abroad, or through embedded networks in academia and civil society. Kyle’s analysis of the Guatemala (chapter 6) and El Salvador (chapter 7) cases, alternatively, demonstrates the difficulties democratic consolidation encounters in postauthoritarian countries with low democratic continuity. In the Central American context, while ex–regime members face high uncertainty under democracy, there is no stable political coalition to dissuade recycled dictators from becoming a persistent feature of the electoral landscape.
The primary strength of the book is that by focusing on the Latin American experience, Kyle generates a number of empirical implications for comparativists to explore other democracies recovering from military rule. Like the Egyptian and Myanmar cases, which Kyle briefly takes up in the conclusion, democratization in many postcolonial states is characterized by either low or entirely nonexistent democratic continuity before military dictatorship. Therefore, scholars could explore whether recycled dictators in postcolonial contexts operate in a political environment similar to El Salvador or Guatemala, only potentially enjoying an even higher likelihood of success at the polls in the absence of any stable political coalition ready to challenge their candidacies. This could particularly be the case where military regimes characterized by personalist rule give way to democracy. The experiences of Indonesia after Suharto and Uganda after Idi Amin immediately come to mind as examples of the type of contexts to which Kyle’s argument could be extended.
Kyle offers a compelling account, even as he revisits well-documented cases in the literature on postauthoritarian transitions in Latin America. He ultimately sets himself apart by focusing specifically on the political dynamics of postmilitary rule, and draws an optimistic conclusion from his research. By participating in elections rather than attempting to stage a coup, even threatened members of former autocratic regimes have accepted that the only legitimate means of gaining political power are the democratic “rules of the game.” Overall, Kyle finds generally low participation and success rates by recycled dictators in all 12 cases. In a combined 63 presidential candidacies by recycled dictators, only 7 resulted in victory (53). The largely weak performance of recycled dictators in elections is convincing evidence in support of the author’s conclusion that democracy is now the only game in town.
There are, however, some questions that linger after reading the book. It is somewhat unclear whether it is a stable and competitive party system or time under democracy before dictatorship that is doing most of the heavy lifting in a given case. His historical chapters emphasize party consolidation, which itself may be endogenous to structural factors other than democratic continuity, such as variability in political coalitions due to landholding inequality, urbanization, or the impact of earlier agrarian reforms (see Michael Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform, 2015). I would be interested in a lengthier discussion of the differing effects of time under democracy on the one hand, and party formation on the other, regarding the competitiveness of recycled dictators under democracy. In addition, recent empirical research shows the impact of constitutional reform under dictatorship and political institutions, such as proportional representation, on the uncertainty of autocrats under transition (see Michael Albertus and Victor Menaldo, “Dealing with Dictators: Negotiated Democratization and the Fate of Outgoing Autocrats,” International Studies Quarterly 58, 3, 2014). Though Kyle does reference institutions throughout the book, his framework does not explicitly specify the relationship between the institutional environment and the uncertainty that outgoing regimes face as they transition toward democracy.
I look forward to future work that seeks to unpack postauthoritarian politics with an eye to the political developments that precede the previous regime, whether democratic or some other form of authoritarian rule. In this regard, Kyle puts forth a welcome contribution that paves the way for additional avenues of inquiry, not just in Latin America but also across the developing world. By focusing more on how antecedent conditions combine with particular types of democratic transitions, democratization scholars can continue to develop more nuanced understandings of postauthoritarian politics.
