Democracy and Political Institutions in Latin America: Reconciling Approaches

Reforming The State: Managerial Public Administration In Latin America. Edited by Luiz Carlos Bresser Pereira and Peter Spink. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 1999. Pp. 213. $55.00 cloth.)

Stuffing The Ballot Box: Fraud, Electoral Reform, And Democratization In Costa Rica. By Fabrice E. Lehoucq and Iván Molina. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 294. $60.00 cloth.)

Conservative Parties, The Right, And Democracy In Latin America. Edited by Kevin J. Middlebrook. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. 391. $23.50 paper.)

Political Cleavages: Issues, Parties And The Consolidation Of Democracy. By Alejandro Moreno. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999. Pp. 224. $90.00, cloth.)

Legislative Politics In Latin America. Edited by Scott Morgenstern and Benito Nacif. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 503. $65.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.)

Problemas Y Perspectivas De La Democracia En América Latina. By Darío Salinas Figueredo. (Mexico, D.F.: Triana Editores, 1999. Pp. 429. Price not available.)

Mandates And Democracy: Neoliberalism By Surprise In Latin America. By Susan Stokes. (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. 220. $55.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.)

By the mid 1990s Latin American countries appeared firmly on the road to institutionalized and predictable democratic politics. However, the recent detours of many countries have created intellectual tensions in contemporary academic work on democracy in the region: tensions between those who focus on democratic governability and those who focus on economic equality; between those whose central concern is elites and institutions and those who find explanations at the popular and social level; between those who analyze formal institutions, and those who see informality as the key to understanding politics. In methodological terms we see tension between those who employ increasingly sophisticated methodologies (often from U.S. literature and drawing on the United States as a comparative referent), and those who contend that these methodologies cause us to miss the essence of politics in the region.

These tensions are clearest in debates on rational-choice institutionalism, and in recent work on "delegative democracy." Rational choice institutionalism has become a predominant paradigm for studying Latin American politics. Its basic premise is that instrumental rationality governs political choice within an institutionally based incentive structure. Operating with scientific pretensions based on micro-political foundations and individual rationality, rational-choice institutionalists have built an impressive edifice of theory, especially related to electoral systems and executive\legislative relations.² Still emerging crisis in Latin America has helped generate doubt concerning the explanatory power of this approach. Weyland very effectively criticizes rational-choice institutionalism, arguing that it "has difficulty explaining the complicated, variegated and fluid patterns of Latin American politics" (2002, 1). Further, for Weyland this approach relies too much on analysis of the electoral and legislative arenas and cannot deal with political crisis and change.

O'Donnell (1994) argues that we may be on the wrong track as well. He points to a divergence in politics between advanced capitalist countries and the rest of the world, pointing to a "new species" called "delegative democracy" that has taken hold in developing countries. Weyland's critique suggests we may be on the wrong track methodologically, while O'Donnell suggests that we may need to change our view of the empirics of politics and adjust our methodological tools accordingly. He questions the importance of analyzing institutions where citizens forgo representation, surrendering their democratic rights to excessively powerful presidents cast in the role of a Hobbesian leviathan. If this is an accurate vision of democracy, we may be missing the explanatory boat if we rely too heavily on the analysis of lower-level and non-executive institutions.

In light of these tensions, where does the literature on democratic politics in the Americas stand, and where should we go? The works reviewed here show that the study of Latin American politics is healthy, dynamic, methodologically sophisticated, and that scholars have heeded the call for...