State Crisis in Fragile Democracies: Polarization and Political Regimes in South America

Recent years have seen the growing accumulation of studies of the so-called left turn in Latin America. Amid that body of scholarship, this book stands out in several ways. It focuses on the full range of outcomes, including not only cases with “radical” and “moderate” left governments but also those in which left governments have not come to power. It also explores not only the political coalitions that came to power—the initial “left turn” outcomes—but also the implications for regime trajectories; as Handlin writes, a “major question of interest for this book” is “why populist episodes in some countries have produced democratic erosion while such episodes in other countries have merely been conducive to pathologies such as delegative democracy or presidential impeachment” (17). In short, this is an ambitious study. It is also a careful, well-written, and empirically rich book. Against the predominant body of explanations for variation in “left turn” outcomes that emphasize economic factors, this book focuses on two oft-neglected features of the context in which the new left governments emerged: a crisis of state institutions in objective and subjective terms, and what Handlin calls “the infrastructure of left-wing political mobilization” (6). Together, these two factors determine whether existing political arrangements are displaced by outsiders, and whether those outsiders polarize politics or come to power through more pragmatic means. This provides a parsimonious and convincing account for why countries in South America followed one of three paths in the post–Cold War era. In cases (Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia) in which a state crisis generated space for outsider politicians and an existing left-wing infrastructure existed for their use as they rose to power, these outsiders polarized politics both on a left-right spectrum and by leveraging antisystem appeals. Where, as in Paraguay and Peru, the state crisis created space for outsiders but no left-wing infrastructure existed, outsiders came to power without either centrally emphasizing ideological appeals or engaging in the fundamental alteration of regime institutions. And in cases like Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile, more stable and effective state institutions precluded the emergence of outsiders, and the left turn unfolded through the rise to power of existing political parties of the left. These three political paths (what Handlin calls “three lefts rather than two,” 240) each have had consistent patterns of legacies for political regimes. Polarizing outsiders brought the erosion of representative democracy, cases with more pragmatic outsiders have seen the erosion of horizontal accountability and the emergence of interbranch crises, and the last path has brought stronger representative democracy. Handlin traces these trajectories through a detailed comparison of Brazil and Venezuela (chapters 3–5), followed by more concise but nevertheless compelling and detailed accounts, in chapters 6–8, of the six other countries mentioned above, following in each case how the post–Cold War political arena was transformed by his two crucial variables and tracing the implications for whether a “left turn” occurred and for the regime outcomes that ensued. 122 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 60: 3