- Latin American Legislative Politics
The five volumes reviewed in this essay grapple with two core questions. First, do legislatures matter? Do they have any impact on policy, governability, or the quality of democracy? Second, what explains the type of legislature or legislative party system observed in each country and, by extension, the role a legislature can play?
The authors of these volumes tackle both questions from a variety of methodological, theoretical, and substantive approaches. Using qualitative and quantitative, multicase and single-case studies, and examining institutions, leadership, and societies, they explore legislative politics in Latin America. In spite of these diverse approaches, the answer to the first question is a unanimous "yes." All the authors find that legislatures play key roles in shaping policy, resolving (or failing to resolve) economic crises, granting legitimacy to institutions, and consolidating representative democracy. On the theoretical and substantive conclusions, the authors diverge somewhat, but not dramatically, in their identification of key variables: electoral rules, progressive ambition, federalism, presidential strategy, ideological cohesion, and leadership. [End Page 163]
The questions these authors ask and the answers they find reflect simultaneously the strengths and weaknesses of comparative legislative studies. The core questions are important and appropriate and the general methodological approach well proven. They build on existing legislative studies, especially those of the U.S. Congress, but add theoretical and empirical dimensions unavailable in the single-case studies of the House of Representatives that dominate that literature. At the same time, a second set of questions goes largely unaddressed, questions that deserve attention and should define a new frontier of scholarship. In addition, some of the authors test their core hypotheses only partially.
I will move directly into brief volume-by-volume reviews. In each, I'll summarize the core argument, recap the evidence mustered, identify the core contribution, and point to several book-specific limitations. I'll save the broader challenges for all the authors and the rest of the subfield for my concluding remarks.
Patterns of Legislative Politics
Scott Morgenstern provides an ambitious, rare, and very careful multicountry test of institutions' impact on legislative party strength. His book makes an important theoretical and empirical contribution.
Morgenstern seeks to explore the variables that explain legislative agent strength, with a particular focus on both cohesion and discipline. He starts by noting that the field's dedication to studies of political parties is sometimes inappropriate. Parties, he points out, are simply legal constructs that sometimes facilitate representation in modern democracies. At other times, however, other political organizations can perform similar roles. For example, the literature says that parties should build brand names or labels that enable accurate retrospective punishment or reward of governmental performance. Morgenstern calls this identifiability. At the same time, parties should be able to compromise with each other, especially in moments of crisis; Morgenstern calls this flexibility. But there is no reason that the same roles can't be played by distinct factions within parties or coalitions of multiple parties. Indeed, almost every task and outcome that we attribute to political parties could be performed by other groupings of legislators. His point is subtle but very important, and suggests that we should reorganize our thinking about our core dependent variables in the study of legislative politics.
Agent flexibility and identifiability are directly manifest in unity on roll-call...