The Quality of Democracy: Theory and Applications

Abstract

The Quality of Democracy: Theory and Applications. Edited by Guillermo O'Donnell, Jorge Vargas Cullell, and Osvaldo M. Iazzetta. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. 288p. $55.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.The primary goal of this unique and compelling book is to provide the theoretical and empirical foundations for what the authors hope will be a new wave of interest in the quality of democracy. At the heart of the book is a reaction against the minimalist definitions of democracy that in the past two decades have come to dominate not just the regime literature but also the democracy promotion work of a whole host of external donors in what Guillermo O'Donnell calls the East and South. While more countries have been able to sustain minimally democratic political regimes than early pessimists feared, the paramount failings of democracy nevertheless have been of growing concern to academics and citizens alike. According to the argument advanced in this book, understanding the performance of these new democracies—and identifying strategies for strengthening democracy—requires that we move beyond regime type “toward other spheres where political power is exercised” (p. 1). In much of Latin America, for example, political regimes experienced democratization while many of the state's authoritarian legacies were maintained more or less intact. In addition to conceptualizing democracy in a richer and more complex way, the book goes on to show how this more comprehensive view of democracy can be measured and evaluated, which it does by describing an actual democracy audit in one important Latin American case: Costa Rica.