The authors of Voter Participation propose “to interpret the complexities and various meanings of electoral participation in Central America to students and readers who may know little about the region” (p. iv). Unfortunately, from its dubious assumptions and irritating jargon—“the salient features of the Central American political scenario” (p. iv)—to a shoddy printing job, at least in the review copy, the book is a disappointment.
The first five chapters begin with brief surveys of socioeconomic data and political history for each of the Central American republics. Perhaps the most useful of this is the information on military involvement in politics. Included also are descriptions of elections since the early 1950s, but in most cases without such basic statistics as regional or party breakdowns or any indication of who voted for whom and why. A final chapter gives the results of a questionnaire administered principally to Central American university faculty and students about electoral conditions in their countries—e.g., your elections are “more or less legal” (p. 244)—together with an attempt to correlate voter participation, sketchily defined and never developed, to a series of modernization variables (pp. 248ff.). The authors turn up few significant relationships and never address the more basic problem of how a variable can “explain” (p. 252) anything.
Bowdler and Cotter seem generally unfamiliar with Central America: e.g., Salvadorians are said not to be “political activists” (p. 24) because they do not adorn their houses with party flags, or “for some reason the regular presidential election did not take place in 1972 [in Nicaragua]” (p. 63). Having demonstrated, if nothing else, the general irrelevance of elections to the recent political decisionmaking in any Central American country except Costa Rica, they conclude that “this confirms the critical role free and honest elections play in the political environment of the five Central American states” (p. 256).
