Stuffing the Ballot Box: Fraud, Electoral Reform, and Democratization in Costa Rica by Fabrice E. Lehoucq, Iván Molina (review)

Book Reviews 123 BOOK REVIEWS Lehoucq, Fabrice E. and lvln Molina. StiifJing the Ballot Box: Fraiid, Electoral Reform, and Democratization it1 Costa Rica. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Stuffring the Ballot Box brings scholarly attention to a topic that has long been the subject of journalistic political intrigue. While “stuffing the ballot box” is an eye-catching title, Lehoucq and Molina deal with a much broader range of electoral chicanery than just illegally cast ballots. Their work explores the many different tactics used by Costa Rican political parties to attempt to ensure their electoral success over a 50-year period before the installation of Costa Rica’s present stable democratic regime. More importantly, the book goes far beyond merely describing the extent and tactics of electoral fraud, as its primary concern is testing competing hypotheses about the causes of electoral fraud paired with understanding when and why the same political parties that benefited from fraudulent tactics in the past would reform electoral procedures. For this reason the book is more than an exhaustive study of historical Costa Rican politics, as it provides theoretical insights and empirical evidence about the process of electoral reform-and as such it is a work that at a theoretical level will be of interest to scholars interested in electoral reform and democratization in all parts of the world. The book unfolds in an orderly fashion with each chapter presenting the history of a different period in the evolution of Costa Rican electoral fraud and reform. It presents a wealth of detailed, historical information about Costa Rican electoral politics, but does not presume that the reader has prior knowledge of the Costa Rican case, thus making the book accessible to readers unfamiliar with Costa Rican, or even Central American politics. The immense quantity of archival work done by the authors allows the book to be impressively grounded in historical evidence so that they provide empirical evidence to back up arguments that the reader would typically be expected to take on faith. Lehoucq and Molina base their analysis on an original dataset of allegations of electoral fraud filed with the Costa Rican Legislative Assembly over a 50-year period. By going to the trouble to compile this dataset, they show that electoral fraud can be studied systematically and that hypotheses about the causes of fraud can be systematically tcsted. They developed a coding scheme for evaluating the severity of the fraud (i.e., largely procedural accusations, to tampering with voter rolls or vote tallies, to intimidation of voters). They present two theories of when parties will engage in fraud. SELA Suinmer/FciII 2003 One, where there is more social and economic inequality, they expect that the powerful will steal elections to maintain their position in society. Two, fraud will be used in response to political competitiveness and institutional arrangements. Their results show that these two theories are hard to disentangle in the Costa Rican case. While the rural, peripheral regions of the country are the places where social and economic inequality is greatest, they are also the regions where elections were most often intensely competitive, because the distribution of congressional seats made them single-member district elections, rather than proportional representation elections. Through innovative use of their unique dataset, they show that as the Costa Rican government started to adopt electoral reforms that made “mild” types of electoral fraud no longer feasible, parties began to resort to more extreme measures, such as intimidating voters. For example, when twostage elections were replaced with direct election of all members of the congress and the president, claims of more extreme types of fraud increased as electoral competition became more intense. Adoption of the secret ballot also increased the severity of fraud, because secret ballots made it impossible for parties to keep a tally of local races throughout election day. What is most interesting about their work is the overt, consistent effort to test competing hypotheses about electoral fraud and reform. They present three different schools of thought about the causes of electoral fraud, and thus about factors that will influence attempts at electoral reform: officeseeking , sociological, and institutionalist. The office-seeking theory, based on Downs (1957), posits that, “parties develop policies...