Christian Democracy in Latin America: Electoral Competition and Regime Conflicts (review)

During the past 50 years, Christian Democratic political parties have been very prominent political actors in Latin America. From Chile to El Salvador to Mexico (and many places in between), Christian Democratic parties have had a profound impact on the nature and success of democratic government in the region. Yet in spite of their important role in numerous Latin American countries, we have lacked a comparative study of Christian Democracy in Latin America. Fortunately, this glaring disciplinary lacuna has been filled with the publication of this excellent book.

As two of the world's leading authorities on Latin American political parties, Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully are ideal editors for this volume. As in their outstanding and highly influential Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (1995), here once again they have identified an important topic, designed a framework for a coherent and mutually reinforcing volume, and assembled a prominent group of very talented scholars. The product is a superb book that will be of great interest to those concerned with democracy in Latin America, political parties, and Christian Democracy.

The volume has three sections, each of which contains four chapters. The first section studies several important aspects of Christian Democracy in the Latin American region. The second section examines two Latin American Christian Democratic parties that are currently still prominent players in their respective party systems: the Chilean Christian Democratic Party (two chapters) and the Mexican National Action Party, PAN (two chapters). The third section explores the decline suffered by the majority of the region's Christian Democratic parties over the past dozen years. Chapters are included on the Independent Political Electoral Organizing Committee in Venezuela, the Christian Democratic parties in El Salvador and Guatemala, and the Popular Christian Party in Peru (although in this case the decline is shown to be less evident than in the other three). A final chapter examines the phenomenon of Christian Democratic decline in Latin America from a broader comparative perspective.

In Chapter 1, Scott Mainwaring skillfully highlights the prominent impact of Christian Democratic parties on political life in six Latin American countries (Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela) during the latter half of the twentieth century. He also examines the role played by Christian Democratic parties in the dual game (electoral and regime) that took place in most Latin American countries during that period as a majority of the countries in the region oscillated between authoritarian, fragile democratic, and consolidated democratic regimes. In addition to providing an exceptional review of the mechanics of the game itself, Mainwaring underscores the important part played by the Christian Democratic parties in these simultaneous, and at times contradictory, games. Finally, Mainwaring introduces the 11 other chapters and places them in the theoretical and organizational plan of the volume.

Mainwaring and Scully then explore the diversity of Christian Democracy in Latin America, providing a very helpful introduction to the study of Christian Democracy in the region and charting the varying performance of the parties (including a comprehensive summary of their electoral performance in 11 countries). Chapter 2 also utilizes data from Manuel Alcántara's Proyecto de Elites Latinoamericanas (PELA) to provide an innovative analysis of the attitudes of Christian Democratic legislators (compared to other legislators) on a series of important social and economic issues in Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, and Venezuela. The chapter then carries out a comparable analysis of citizen attitudes using data from Ronald Inglehart's World Values Survey (WVS) for Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela. (Comparable analysis was not possible for Costa Rica and Ecuador because the WVS was not conducted in these countries.) A similar analysis is conducted on legislator and citizen ideological self-placement using a traditional left-right scale. All these analyses underscore the diversity of Christian Democracy in Latin America, a diversity for which Mainwaring and Scully offer four explanations in the final portion of...