Comparing Latin Democracies

What does it mean to speak of the "quality" of a country's democracy, and how can this quality be measured and compared across cases? Since the early 2000s, a number of scholars have been trying to answer these questions. In mid-decade, Daniel Levine and José Molina gathered a distinguished group with the aim of systematically improving upon the existing expert literature. The group's work focused on Latin America, but wider implications are not far to seek. The fruits of the effort are set forth in the present volume, which may safely be called an indispensable tool for all those interested in democracy's fate, whether in Latin America or beyond.

The editors open with a pair of chapters that ask in detail what the quality of democracy is and how it can be gauged. To this they add a final chapter that attempts to draw some conclusions. In between are case-study chapters on Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Each chapter addresses the guiding questions posed by the editors, making the book a truly coherent comparative exercise. A brief review lends itself best to consideration of the general questions rather than the specific findings for each country.

Levine and Molina's curtain-raising theoretical overview is useful and much needed. They rightly insist on a crucial distinction between the quality of democracy as a political process for making decisions and the quality of the decisions and hence outcomes (as these affect security, prosperity, justice, and so on) that any given democracy actually produces. In doing so, they resist a confusing tendency, visible since the late 1990s, to conflate these two concepts. The sad truth is that a society may be well governed from the procedural-democratic point of view, and yet be ill governed in any number of other, more substantive ways.

A second crucial point has to do with the definition of democracy. Levine and Molina insist on a procedural definition because it alone offers enough analytical precision and portability to make the exercise of comparison meaningful. Lastly, Levine and Molina define the focus of their inquiry as "the level of quality of any specific democracy" as "determined by the extent to which citizens can participate in an informed manner in processes of free, fair, and frequent elections; influence the making of political decisions; and hold those who govern accountable" (8, emphasis in original). The quality of democracy is thus a multidimensional continuum.

In operational terms, Levine and Molina posit that democratic quality can be measured along five dimensions: electoral decisions, participation, accountability, responsiveness, and sovereignty. Using these, the editors construct a general "Index of Quality of Democracy" (33). The Index uses data from 2005 or the nearest preceding year for which data were available and lists the seventeen Latin American countries that were considered "electoral democracies" by Freedom House that year. The Index consists of figures running along a 0-to-100 scale (with 100 representing a perfect score) to indicate how well each country did along each of the five dimensions of democratic quality.

According to the Index, Uruguay is the region's highest-quality procedural democracy with an average score of 71.9, followed by Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico clustering together in the low 60s. Guatemala sits at the bottom with a score of 44.6, well below the 17-country average of 57.3. Eight countries—the five already mentioned plus Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil—rank above that average. The remaining nine countries rank below.

The Index shows not only how the various countries rank, but also the relative strengths and weaknesses of each. For example, most countries do well in terms of electoral decisions and sovereignty, especially insofar as the latter can be gauged by the degree of civilian control over the military (no small consideration in a region with a long history of military coups). Participation (average score, 48.5) is a weak spot, which is surprising given the apparent...