Book Reviews

Abstract

In contemporary Latin America, the euphoria that accompanied initial democratization has now been transformed into concern about whether these democracies can truly be “consolidated.” This book is an important contribution to this discussion. Among the editors’ most notable accomplishments is their success in simultaneously encouraging intellectual creativity on the part of contributors and pulling these contributions together in an interesting way. Seeking alternately to explain the sustainability of Latin American democracies, their relative quality, or both, the articles included here explore both troubled and relatively more successful democratic regimes. Approaches and findings vary, but collectively, the book makes an excellent contribution to furthering the understanding of these issues. The book is organized into three main sections, categorizing countries according to the apparent success of their democracies. Three conceptual pieces frame these case studies: Mainwaring and Hagopian’s introduction, a more extensive theoretical chapter by Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, and Hagopian’s conclusion. Each of these essays goes well beyond a mere exercise in integration, which, in turn, implies some divergence among their arguments. The key differences between the conceptual pieces relate to two factors: first, whether the authors focus only on democratic survival or whether they also address quality; and second, how much impact they consider socioeconomic or institutional “structures” and government performance to have on democratic outcomes. Both the introduction and the conclusion look at democratic stability, with political attitudes as the major explanation. Thus, Mainwaring and Hagopian downplay factors such as socioeconomic structure and relative economic success, emphasizing instead the impact of “political factors” on democratic sustainability, especially the attitudes of domestic or international actors. These factors, they argue, can ultimately overcome low economic development, inequality, and poor governmental performance (p. 7). Hagopian’s conclusion similarly emphasizes the importance of political attitudes for explaining democratic stability, but here she portrays attitudes as contingent on effective representation. According to Hagopian,