Learning Democracy: Citizen Engagement and Electoral Choice in Nicaragua, 1990–2001 by Leslie E. Anderson, Lawrence C. Dodd (review)

Book Reviews 153 BOOK REVIEWS Learning Democracy: Citizen Engagement and Electoral Choice in Nicaragua, 1990-2001. By Leslie E. Anderson and Lawrence C. Dodd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. D. 336. $24.00. When Nicaraguans go to the polls in the November 2006 presidential election, they will vote in their fifth such election in the last 22 years. Such electoral consistency stands in dramatic contrast to Nicaragua’s previous history of authoritarian rule. In Learning Democracy, Leslie Anderson and Lawrence Dodd seek to explain the success of democratization in Nicaragua by showing how Nicaraguans learned participatory democracy and why Nicaraguans made particular electoral choices in elections spanning from 1990-2001. Anderson and Dodd’s primary method of analysis interprets polling data and content analysis of leading Nicaraguan dailies to model voter choice. From this analysis, they conclude that the Sandinista revolution, while not fully democratic, helped Nicaraguans learn democracy. Through the increased civic participation at local levels and the reduction in class difference which came about under Sandinista leadership, the revolution provided space for Nicaraguans to participate politically. Nicaraguans then made rational choices in their initial decision to eschew Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista regime for the conservative opposition lead by Violeta Chamorro and their continued support of conservative interests in the 1996 and 2001 elections. Anderson and Dodd reject the conventional wisdom that Nicaraguans voted for Chamorro solely because this would end the Contra War. Rather they hold that voters carefully considered a number of factors and found Chamorro’s vision best suited their interests. Voters continued to conduct sophisticated analysis of candidates in the following elections , finding that a conservative government would best preserve their democratic gains. Anderson and Dodd present a cohesive narrative of each of the three elections, making their analysis easily accessible to readers with little background in Nicaraguan politics. At the same time. both their data and conclusions are of interest to specialists. The content analysis of Nicaraguan newspapers during the 1990 election is particularly valuable, allowing the reader to access the 154 The Latin Americanist Fall 2006 data from their analysis of over 1000different articles.Their tracing of the evolving image of Ortega and Chamorro throughout the campaign also provides intriguing insight into the evolution of popular opinion during the 1990 election. This research depicts how the opinions of the many different strands of Nicaraguan society shifted in response to events such as the American invasion of Panama in December of 1989. Learning Democracy’s conclusions about the rationality of Nicaraguan voters also raise larger theoretical questions about democratization.Anderson and Dodd suggest that even in societies with low levels of income and little social capital, democracy can takeroot quickly.If the assessmentthat the Nicaraguanmasses made complex electoral calculations in all three of the elections studied is correct, it poses a potent challenge to the notion that successfulcitizen engagementin nascent democracies necessarily takes a great deal of time to develop. Most of Learning Democracy leaves little room for complaint . The only significant disappointment is the conclusion, which paints Nicaraguan democratization in too favorablea light. While the authors acknowledge that the development of democracy is imperfect, they still conclude that the Nicaraguan democracy has attained the elements necessary for success through citizen participation. More engagementwith the relationshipbetween entrenched political corruption and citizen involvement would have been welcome. Given that key instruments of the Nicaraguan democracy-including both major political parties and the judiciary-have been implicated in corruption scandals, mass confidencein democracy may be greatly diminished; recent opinion polls show increasing dissatisfaction with democracy among Nicaraguans. Nevertheless, Learning Democracy makes important contributions both in assessing events in Nicaragua and in relating these eventsto theories of democratization.Any serious student of Nicaragua and CentralAmerica will benefit from considering this analysis. Specialists will be most interested in the detailed analysis of electoral choice presented in chapters five through eight. However, the basic questions Anderson and Dodd ask resonate throughout the developing world. Comparativists studying new democracies will undoubtedly find the questions this work raises about democratization of interest no matter where their regional focus lies. Graduate students or academics looking for a useful introduction to contemporary Nicaragua will also find this work helpful. In particular,the...