Though parties are key organizations of any democracy, they typically get short shrift even in academic research about the political systems of developing countries. In Costa Rica, historians rarely study them; Héctor Pérez-Brignoli was the last one to publish a short book on one of them (the now basically moribund Social Christian party) in 1998. Costa Rican political scientists infrequently attend party meetings, interview the leaders or rank and file (much less conduct a systematic survey of party members), or see how parties reach out to society and how they produce legislation.
Fernando F. Sánchez’s fine monograph, the first ever on the country’s party system, begins to fill this void. His book is a lightly revised version of his Oxford DPhil thesis at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University (under the direction of Alan Angell). Its most important virtue is comprehensiveness: Sánchez presents a mass of aggregate electoral returns and public...
