A review of Democracies in Development: Politics and Reform in Latin America by J. Mark Payne et al.
About the Author
Mark P. Jones is associate professor of political science at Michigan State University and a research scholar at the Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Institucional in Argentina.
Long hailed as one of the region’s most vigorous democracies, this small Central American country has seen voters swing massively toward newcomers and away from the two traditionally dominant parties.
Latin America’s much-discussed political “left turn” has taken two very different forms. Why has the region’s commodities boom led some left-turn states to move toward “plebiscitarian superpresidentialism,” while others have…