This is the best book ever produced on political institutions in Latin America. Building on a conference held at the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame in 1990, the editors bring together a diverse group of scholars to examine a compelling subject: the construction of effective political parties as vehicles for popular representation in democratic Latin America.
Rather than compare party systems by the number of parties or the degree of competition among them, the editors chose to compare them by degree of institutionalization. In their excellent introduction, the editors cite four broad criteria for such institutionalization: stability in interparty competition, stable roots in society, organizational effectiveness of the main parties, and legitimacy accorded to the party arena by relevant actors. The last criterion is especially important, given the rise of antiparty populists such as Alberto Fujimori in Peru and Fernando Collor de Mello in Brazil.
Scholarly detractors of political parties cite the rise of modern interest groups, social movements, popular religion, and NGOs as evidence that new representational channels have assumed the functions that parties once held. While not denying the importance of these new vehicles, Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully mount a vigorous defense of parties’ continuing relevance. Modern representative democracy has indeed changed, but elections are still its chief defining element. As long as elections exist, political parties will be there to organize the contests, place the candidates, and provide the organizational, informational, and ideological “shortcuts” that make mass democracy possible.
The editors group the principal Latin American countries into three broad categories of party system institutionalization. Venezuela (in the chapter by Miriam Kornblith and Daniel Levine), Costa Rica (Deborah Yashar), Chile (Scully), Uruguay (Luis González), Colombia (Ronald Archer), and Argentina (James McGuire) are classified as institutionalized party systems. Peru (Julio Cotier), Brazil (Mainwaring), Ecuador (Catherine Conaghan), and Bolivia (Eduardo Gamarra and James Malloy) are weakly institutionalized or “inchoate systems. An intermediate category called “hegemonic party systems in transition” produces the unusual pairing of Mexico (covered by Ann Craig and Wayne Cornelius) and Paraguay (Diego Abente).
The editors provide a concluding chapter discussing the environment of the 1990s and focusing on five issues that have reshaped party politics: democratization, economic crisis, the redefinition of the Left, economic neoliberalism, and the rise of television. Each of these represents promising avenues for future research on representation and political competition in Latin America. The country chapters are of uniformly high quality, and the contributors generally stick to the overall framework and specific variables highlighted by their editors. The book is therefore free of the problems that typically plague edited volumes.
This superb contribution will become required reading in graduate seminars on Latin American politics over the next decade. It fills one of the gaping holes in the study of representative government in Latin America. The advent of democracy made this book necessary; one hopes that companion volumes on electoral behavior and (even more critically) legislatures will soon take their place beside it. If other researchers undertake these challenges, they would be well advised to follow the example of Mainwaring and Scully, who have set a new standard for collaborative research in Latin American politics.
