Representative democracies refuse to collapse in Latin America. They endure even in the face of challenges that, in the region's past, have spelled democratic ruin. These include financial and economic crises, coup attempts, and persistent political and/or criminal violence. But if democracies stand, presidents fail with noticeable frequency. In the last 18 years, chief executives have resigned or been removed from office—without suspension of democratic rule—in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru, and Venezuela. Interrupted presidencies, to borrow Arturo Valenzuela's apposite description, may well become one of three interlinked regional democratic markers. The second potential marker is the ascendance of political outsiders and the return of outcasts: Obscure, improbable, and discredited candidates (re)emerge as viable, even formidable, electoral contenders. The third, though seemingly at odds with the other two, is in fact closely related: citizenries that waver between disenchantment and bitterness, apathy and mobilization.
Together, these traits may point to an underlying “reverse wave” effect, as democratization throws one country after another back into a kind of Huntingtonian void: a schism between growing political and socioeconomic pressures and declining or irrelevant political institutions. This gap has been bridged in the region's history by a range of strategic adaptations—from intricate nets of oligarchic reciprocity to the hierarchically disciplined bargains that ultimately sustained long-lived authoritarian regimes. To varying degrees, political parties were instrumental in the execution of these and other strategies of governance and domination. By the second half of the twentieth century, political parties themselves were key strategic agents in most of the region's countries. Today, however, parties, with a few notable exceptions, are again vulnerable to the caprice of personality and the manipulation of cliques, or have simply waned.
Democracy stands, yet nearly everything else is in flux, perhaps even at stake. Against this critical backdrop arrives the powerful anthology at hand. The shared virtues of its chapters are analytical lucidity and robust empirical knowledge. Indeed, all the chapters contribute to the volume's general objective—to assess the quality of the region's democratic regimes—yet commendably, none is a ledger disguised as analysis. Rather, each chapter seriously deals with old patterns and new deviations in order to make better sense of democratization processes and outcomes.
Like all successful edited volumes, this one underscores the plain fact that a good editor begins by selecting contributors who can grapple simultaneously with the collection's overarching theme and the complexities of their cases. Coeditors Frances Hagopian and Scott Mainwaring easily deliver on this count. They also deliver a final product whose value exceeds the sum of its parts. Their introductory chapter is synthetic in the best sense of the term. Drawing on the contributors' analyses with refined intuition, Mainwaring and Hagopian extract a broad claim. Democratic advances and setbacks, as well as their distribution among countries, can be better understood by exploring the enmeshed ecologies in which polities' normative/attitudinal factors interact with the regional and international political environments.
Although this claim is inherently significant, it also points to the usefulness of a political-cultural complement to structural and institutional approaches. It matters, then, that the claim itself is well substantiated by Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñàn in their analysis of post-1978 democratization—an ambitious but nicely rendered chapter that is regional/international in scope and focuses on trends. And it matters, too, that the subsequent case studies add depth, in good measure because they too bring political culture back in to enhance the utility of alternative approaches.
Thus, Steven Levitsky and Kurt Weyland effectively contend with the long-standing, large-scale dilemmas of Argentina and Brazil—most notably, systemic instability in the former, and poverty and inequality in the latter. But in addition, these authors incorporate variables, such as value shifts, political imagination, organizational strength, and coalitional possibilities. In Argentina, Levitsky argues, an emergent elite democratic consensus and relatively strong civic and media organizations have increased democracy's resilience. And in Brazil, as Weyland shows, socioeconomic modernization certainly lends structural support to democracy, but its improved quality stems from a blend of growing elite acceptance of democracy, imaginative institutional experimentation, and more favorable conditions for coalition building.
Explaining patterns and deviations is also paramount for Michael Coppedge, whose excellent chapter on Venezuela demonstrates how citizens' interpretative frames, in combination with increasingly overbearing political parties, eroded the country's party-based democracy. The dynamic can be roughly sketched as follows. Significant numbers of Venezuelans—convinced of their nation's fundamental wealth and keenly aware of both public corruption and the dominant political parties' institutionalization of impunity—came to interpret economic decline as the handiwork of plundering politicians. Long the stewards and beneficiaries of the system, parties became the targets of the citizenry's moral indignation; and as they proved unable to respond effectively to grievances, voters turned to an antiparty leader to set things right.
Another troubled democracy, Colombia, is skillfully examined by Ana María Bejarano and Eduardo Pizarro. They identify and explain the perceptions and strategies of the institutional and extra-institutional players that have truncated the state's monopoly on coercive power. And they argue quite convincingly that one key result of such truncation is that while Colombia's democratic rights of representation and competition remain in effect, human and civil rights are repeatedly violated. Indeed, the assassination of candidates and journalists has become the bloody emblem of a political system in which the electoral game and the game of war are entwined.
In the chapter on Guatemala, Mitchell Seligson argues with characteristic insight that the peace accords strove ambitiously to establish an institutional foundation for democratic consolidation, but that the fulfillment of this grand project has been hampered by socioeconomic deficits and the absence of a corresponding democratic political culture. One important consequence: a list of unmet promises, plus the dangers they pose to democracy.
Writing on El Salvador, Elizabeth Wood deftly analyzes the interplay between the legacies of a tormented democratization and the fuerzas vivas of politics and society. Wood succeeds brilliantly at explaining the low quality of the country's new democracy. Specifically, political learning, institutional reform, and unprecedented freedoms bolster the odds for broader political inclusion and meaningful competition, while social exclusion, poverty, and rampant criminal violence undermine the citizenry's capacity and will for involvement in and support for the system. If, at last, the realistic options are exit, voice, and loyalty, it is still rational for most to choose the first, and if possible, go north.
The remaining chapters are also impressive. For Bolivia and Peru, respectively, René Mayorga and Martín Tanaka each argue with striking parsimony that political innovators can transcend historically entrenched obstacles and improve democracy's chances. Beatriz Magaloni convincingly demonstrates that Mexico's dominant party and its incumbents, seeking to legitimate electoral outcomes that they expected to be favorable, undertook a series of liberalizing electoral-institutional reforms. Spread over two decades, the reforms drove the system's stealth democratization.
Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica—arguably the region's most intriguing democracies—are conspicuously absent. The editors justify the trio's exclusion by pointing to their strong democratic traditions. No surprise if their democracies endure, or so goes the reasoning. But the strength of these same traditions did not preclude the breakdown of democracy in Chile and Uruguay in the 1970s. Equally important, why did it survive in Costa Rica? Further, should we ignore disturbing signs, such as the increasingly acute political apathy among Chileans, or the diminishing identification with their political parties by Uruguayans and Costa Ricans? Perhaps the editors can be persuaded to undertake a second volume.
