Book Reviewsgove_1529 393..406

Groupthink vs. High Quality Decision Making in International Relations. Mark Schaferand Scott Crichlow. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 279 pp. $26.50(paper).

If he were alive today, Irving Janis would probably be a contented man.Forty years after he, a Yale psychologist interested in human decisionmaking, started to dabble in foreign policy analysis after reading hisdaughter’s high school essay on the Kennedy administration’s Bay of Pigsfiasco, research into the powerfully Orwellian idea of “groupthink,”which he developed to account for this and other instances of foreignpolicy failure, is alive and well. On the strength of Janis’s captivating casestudies including the escalation of the Korean and Vietnam wars,groupthink has become a staple in textbooks across a range of socialscience disciplines, and in media commentary as well as inquiry reportsconcerning policies that have gone horribly wrong. The essence ofgroupthink is the lack of rigor and the prevalence of bias sustained bysubtle but powerful pressures for conformity in the modus operandi ofhigh-level policymaking groups. Its presence increases the probability ofpolicy failure; its absence increases the probability of success, as Janis’s“counter” case study the Kennedy administration’s handling of the Cubanmissile crisis suggested. The practical implications of groupthink are clear:Policymaking structures, processes, and leadership practices shouldtherefore be designed to organize helpful levels of diversity of opinionsand expertise, open debate, and rigorous information search andprocessing.

Though the large volume of follow-up research comprising in-depthcase studies in various countries, eras, and policy sectors as well as labo-ratory experiments has shown mixed support for the theoretical frame-work that Janis had built around his idea, the allure of groupthink hasgone undiminished. Even those who criticize the model and proposefar-reaching changes to the causal model Janis put forward still agree thatexcessive consensus seeking and indeed an insidiously manufactured illu-sion of consensus are at least as serious a threat to the quality of decisionmaking inside the government as entrenched factional infighting andinternecine bureaucratic warfare are.

Janis can be content because he managed to instigate a productiveresearch program that far exceeded the boundaries of his own discipline,and because the lessons of that program are of high practical importancein the design and management of governmental and corporate institutions

Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions, Vol. 24, No. 2,April 2011 (pp. 393–405).© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 GarsingtonRoad, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK. ISSN 0952-1895

for collective decision making. Janis would be most pleased with the mostrecent book-length study inspired by his research program, published byU.S. political psychologists Mark Schafer and Scott Crichlow. Theirs is themost courageous, innovative, methodical, and insightful study about whatgoes on inside the black box of the decision-making process that producesthe policies you and I read about on the front page of our newspapers.

It is courageous because it tackles a theory and indeed a wider subfield(the psychological dynamics of policy decision making inside govern-ment) that many social scientists have placed in the “too hard to handle”box, preferring the convenient abstractions of “the state,” “governance,”and “networks.” It is also courageous because—like Janis—it does not shyaway from tough evaluative questions about the properties and the causesof high- and low-quality outcomes, processes, and structures of publicpolicymaking (among others by making creative use of expert panel ratingmethodology). It moreover takes on the challenge of tackling the mostconspicuous and contested foreign policy adventure of the twenty-firstcentury: the Bush administration’s war on Iraq.

The book is innovative. It is one of the first comprehensive studies thatconsiders the characteristics of government leaders and the possible rolethese characteristics may have played in bringing about (or impeding)defective decision-making processes of the groupthink ilk. Oddly,however, the authors completely overlook Bertjan Verbeek’s Decision-Making in Great Britain During the Suez Crisis: Small Groups and a PersistentLeader (Ashgate, 2003), which took the same approach, though with only asingle case as its empirical object. (They also somewhat underplay thepioneering work of Thomas Preston’s The President and His Inner Circle[Columbia University Press, 2001], which, though not a groupthink studyper se, intimately explores the leader–group nexus in policymaking pro-cesses relying extensively on primary documents and interviews ratherthan on Schafer and Crichlow’s exclusive use of secondary sources).

The book is methodical in that it combines the kind of small-n, quali-tative, narrative approach to case study analysis that made Janis’s booksuch a gripping read with the kind of large(r)-n, quantitative regressionmodeling that has thus far been largely absent from nonexperimentalresearch on groupthink. The small-n part neatly contrasts four cases ofpolicy failure with three cases of prudent and well-regarded policychoices. The large-n part covers 39 cases covering nine governments inthree different countries. Each case was coded for about three dozencontextual, group structural, decision process, and policy outcome vari-ables. Though there is much to be discussed about the coding methodsused and a relatively scant account of things like source bias, expert panelcomposition, and intercoder reliability rates, this by any standard repre-sents an empirical effort that is both smart and conscientious.

Finally, the study is insightful because it places the groupthink phenom-enon within a broader perspective on foreign policy decision making,never overstates the case it tries to make, and succeeds in persuading the

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reader of the practical relevance of its message. At one level, the study’smain findings simply reinforce the line of reasoning developed by Janisand a whole range of other scholars in the foreign policy analysis field:Smart institutional design and balanced management of policymakingprocesses matter. But at another level, it picks apart the originalgroupthink model and weeds out the weaker bits (e.g., Janis’s claims thatsituational factors such as threat and time pressure are a pivotal cause ofgroupthink). The study adds a whole new layer of analysis about theproperties of leaders’ traits and behaviors that can help make or break theintegrity of high-level policymaking processes. It further shows thatleader traits are not immutable but rather situation-contingent states ofmind that allow for on-the-job learning processes to alter leadership style,thus helping to explain why essentially the same foreign policy elitegroups around presidents like Carter and Reagan could have producedboth conspicuous policy failures and notable successes at different pointsin time, or with regard to different regions or policy challenges.

This is all a roundabout way of saying: I like this book, buy it, read it,emulate it, and if you do, the bar within, but potentially far beyond, thefield of foreign policy analysis will be raised.

PAUL ‘T HART, Utrecht University and Australian National University

Democratic Governance. Mark Bevir. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,2010. 320 pp. $29.95 (paper).

As perspicacious readers of this journal will have noted, governance hasbecome a pivotal term in our political vocabulary. Over a period of twodecades or so we have witnessed the rise and spread of a new language ofgovernance in the social sciences, a complex language supposedlymatched in the real world by equally complex political and administrativechanges. Forfeiting complexity, these changes are often summed up as aturn “from government to governance,” from a pattern of rule premisedon formal hierarchies to a pattern of rule premised on informal networksand markets. Nobody has done more than Mark Bevir to describe, unpack,and critically assess the rise and spread of the language of governance inthe social sciences and in the world we purport to study. Bevir’s latestbook, Democratic Governance, makes three vital contributions to our under-standing of these developments in political theory and practice.

For one, Bevir offers a historical analysis—in his idiom, a “narrative” or“story”—of how the language of governance has risen and spread in aninterplay between, on the one hand, theories of the state and ideals ofrationality in “modernist social science” and, on the other hand, the publicsector reforms commonly designated by the term “governance.” Second,we also get a critique of what Bevir takes to be the implications of thesedevelopments for our ideas and institutions of democracy. “The newgovernance,” Bevir argues, “poses dilemmas for representative democ-

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racy,” especially problems of oversight and accountability. Standardresponses to such problems rest on the very modernist theories that haveengendered the problems in question, insofar as proposals for reform relyon networks, markets, and policy expertise to make up for representativeinstitutions failing to effectively steer and oversee the new world of gov-ernance (p. 252). Third, there is a moral to the story in Bevir’s ownresponse to the same problems: a prescription of democratic governancebased on “interpretive social science.” According to Bevir, we shouldrespond to our current predicament “less by appeals to an allegedlyformal and ahistorical expertise, and more by alternative forms of democ-racy” (p. 4). There is a need for policy processes that allow for broaderparticipation, and that participants in such processes “give up manage-ment techniques and strategies for a practice of learning by telling storiesand listening to them,” storytellers including social scientists, policymak-ers, and citizens (p. 272).

The level of ambition should be clear already from this brief précis.Anyone with an interest in the way we are now being ruled and in theideas used both to make sense of and justify the way we are now beingruled have much to learn from Democratic Governance. Bevir demonstratesan impressive mastery of the miscellaneous elements of the narrative,from general theories of the state and concepts of accountability to doc-trines of constitutional, judicial, and administrative reform, to specificpolicies in the area of police reform. Given the range of the book differentreaders will no doubt take to—and take objection to—different aspects ofit. My reading finds it most compelling in its historical contribution. Tomy knowledge, Bevir is the first to systematically examine the ideas andpractices of governance in a longer historical perspective. On this point thebook is a much-needed correction to the popular delusion—propagatedand sustained through the language of governance itself—that what iscurrently being broached under this label is all new.

But the book’s century-long perspective and the refreshingly boldambitions also lead to an inclusive concept of governance that seems toexpand and contract with the twists and turns of the narrative. Alterna-tively, the concept is associated with “a pluralist view of the state” origi-nally articulated in the first decades of the twentieth century, with “anearlier literature on policy networks” dating back to the 1970s, and withthe public sector reforms of the 1980s and 1990s (p. 254). Bevir’s story thuscovers both a familiar “new governance” and a more amorphous oldgovernance that harks back to the early twentieth century, specifically topluralist political theory and the turn to scientism and later behavioralismin the social sciences (cf. Enroth 2010a, 2010b; Gunnell 2004; Ross 1991).Undoubtedly this story makes historical sense, albeit for reasons of claritysome of us might want to reserve the term “governance” for more recentdevelopments. Also, it is not entirely clear whether the narrative is ulti-mately tied together by “family resemblances” (p. 8) between ideas andpractices as narrated after the fact, or by “beliefs” actually held by the

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modernist social scientists and policymakers who are the main protago-nists of the story (p. 122; cf. Bevir 1999, 75–76).

Bevir’s narrative compellingly relates the flair for expertise amongpolicymakers to the ideals of rationality on which social scientists tendto model their accounts of the policy process. As to the consequences ofthis connection for democracy, it may be instructive to contrast Demo-cratic Governance with Frank Vibert’s The Rise of the Unelected, recentlyreviewed in this journal (van Veen 2010). Vibert is unreservedly positiveabout the same developments that Bevir criticizes. Vibert notes thatunelected bodies such as central banks, environmental agencies, and aninstitution such as the European Commission today supplement repre-sentative political institutions in producing policy, regulations, and sanc-tions, and he argues that such bodies effectively generate a legitimacy oftheir own through the principles of empirical inquiry on the basis ofwhich they gather and process information. Vibert thus paints Bevir’snew governance and modernist social science not as threats to democ-racy but as harbingers of a “new style of democracy,” premised on an“informed citizen” seeking “facts” rather than political judgments(Vibert 2007, 1–17). The problem, if such it is, with these contrastingassessments is not so much that the jury is still out but that any verdictwill turn less on empirical support and more on the values in the nameof which empirical support is amassed. Modern representative democ-racy has always harbored conflicts between participation and expertise,and we should not expect such conflicts to suddenly go away or subsidewith an alleged turn from government to governance, or from an old toa new governance. If anything we should expect what Bevir’s and Vib-ert’s books illustrate: Intensified conflicts between these values as coreideas and institutions of democracy are increasingly in question, or evenseemingly in peril.

This brings me to the prescriptive contribution in Democratic Gover-nance. The call for broader participation in policy processes and learningby way of storytelling instead of policy expertise is normatively as well asepistemologically appealing, but the proposals beg questions about insti-tutional dynamics and the role of social science in facilitating reform. If wewant to unpack governance as a set of historically evolved ideas andpractices, Bevir’s focus on “situated” agency and reasoning may be ofgreat help. If we want to assess the scope for institutional reform throughstorytelling, the categorical dismissal of new institutionalism as “modern-ist” may not help. Getting someone to embrace—or just listen to—a newstory about the practice in which they are engaged seems to me a kind ofsituation where we might benefit not only from anthropological researchin the vein of Clifford Geertz and his followers but also from research onpositive feedback and institutional learning that Bevir gives short shrift to(cf. Pierson 2004).

As to the role of social science, is there not a lingering modernism in thehope that interpretive social science might facilitate institutional reform by

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instructing policymakers and citizens in the art of storytelling? Participa-tory theorists, we may recall, have entertained similar hopes, at least sinceJohn Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems (Dewey 1927). However that maybe, one of the great merits of Democratic Governance is that it compels us tothink seriously about the very viability of prescription in this context. Ifwe discard modernist social science, should we perhaps also discard itspenchant for instruction altogether and leave prescription and reformentirely to “participants in the relevant democratic practices” (p. 14)? What,if any, would be the consequences for those practices if we do? And whatwould then be the justification for a form of social inquiry that has his-torically been premised on policy advice? These are questions for all of usto ponder as we muddle through the language and world of governance.

HENRIK ENROTH, Linnaeus University

References

Bevir, Mark. 1999. The Logic of the History of Ideas. Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Dewey, John. 1927. The Public and Its Problems. London: George Allen & Unwin.Enroth, Henrik. 2010a. “Policy Network Theory.” In The SAGE Handbook of Gover-

nance, ed. Mark Bevir. London: Sage.———. 2010b. “Beyond Unity in Plurality: Rethinking the Pluralist Legacy.” Con-

temporary Political Theory 9: 458–476.Gunnell, John G. 2004. Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Dis-

course of Democracy. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Pierson, Paul. 2004. Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. Prince-

ton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Ross, Dorothy. 1991. The Origins of American Social Science. Cambridge, UK: Cam-

bridge University Press.van Veen, Adriejan. 2010. “Review of Frank Vibert, The Rise of the Unelected.”

Governance 23 (4): 697–700.Vibert, Frank. 2007. The Rise of the Unelected: Democracy and the New Separation of

Powers. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

The International Monetary Fund in the Global Economy: Banks, Bonds, and Bailouts.M. S. Copelovitch. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.394 pp. $33.00 (paper).

This book provides a comprehensive review of how decisions are taken inthe International Monetary Fund (IMF) on its nonconcessional lendingoperations and programs, and is exceptional in terms of its depth ofcoverage and adroit use of both statistical analysis and case studies. Thebook is concerned with decision-making processes and not with theunderlying macroeconomic policies. The main period covered by the bookis 1984–2003. Unfortunately, therefore, the study does not discuss thefascinating period in the Fund’s more recent history during which timelending virtually dried up, its very survival as a Bretton Woods institutionwas threatened, a new income model including gold sales was put in

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place, and many staff were laid off or voluntarily retired, before the globalfinancial crisis in 2008 led to a rapid upsurge of demand for Fund lendingand pledges to increase its resources.

M. S. Copelovitch develops a powerful analytical framework. Drawingon principal–agent theories of international organizations, the book setsout a “common agent” theory of Fund decision making, in which the G5governments (the “collective principal”) and the IMF staff (the “agent”)jointly determine Fund lending decisions. This theory is an approximationsince the Fund’s primary decision-making body, the executive board, isitself an agent of the national governments, especially finance ministersand central bank governors, with whom the board members are in regularcommunication (this relationship itself would make an interesting study).Copelovitch argues, in contrast to many scholars and critics, that the IMFis neither the servant of the U.S. government nor an out-of-control bureau-cracy. State influence lies not with one country (the United States) butrather is held collectively by the Fund’s largest shareholders, notably theG5 group of countries (the United States, Japan, Germany, the UnitedKingdom, and France). The author develops a set of testable hypotheseslinking variation in these actors’ preferences—and therefore variation inthe size and conditionality of Fund loans—to changes in patterns of finan-cial globalization over time and across the countries reviewed.

An important theme of the book is the importance of “catalytic financ-ing,” namely, the ability—and, indeed, necessity—of Fund-lending pro-grams to stimulate complementary financing from the private sector,either from commercial banks (the dominant lenders up to the 1980s) orthrough bond financing. The book’s main conclusion is that the changingpattern of international capital flows since the 1980s has substantiallyaffected the decision-making calculus of IMF loans. The Fund cannotnegotiate with tens of thousands of heterogeneous, disaggregated bond-holders, nor can these creditors organize themselves rapidly to agree onthe provisions of catalytic financing. The shift toward nonsovereignlending has further undermined the Fund’s ability to secure catalyticfinancing pledges—which were commonplace up to the 1990s—fromprivate creditors before it makes its own lending commitments.

Another important theme is the difficult trade-off that underlies eachcase of IMF lending. That is the trade-off between reducing the risk ofdefault by providing liquidity and exacerbating moral hazard. Since everyIMF loan invariably has both effects, the dilemma confronting policymak-ers lies in determining the extent to which the moral hazard costs of IMFlending outweigh the benefits of liquidity in a specific case. Copelovitchargues persuasively that this is rarely, if ever, simply an economic choicethat can be adjudicated on the basis of analysis of macroeconomic analysisand external debt indicators. On the contrary, “it is a highly politicaldecision influenced by the interests of both the Fund and its memberstates,” interests that have evolved with changes in the pattern of financialglobalization. Copelovitch may nevertheless overstate the importance of

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the moral hazard argument: One must remember a stigma is attached toapproaching the Fund for a loan and arduous fiscal conditions may beimposed, which are pleasant for neither the politicians nor the people.

The book explores several canards about IMF decision making: in par-ticular, that the United States exerts excessive power and control of boarddecisions (though as the unsavory episode of the 1995 loan to Mexico—brilliantly described in the book—illustrates, the United States can get itsown way when the chips are down). Nevertheless, Copelovitch providesquite convincing evidence that “IMF policies are heavily biased toward thepreferences of the United States and other advanced countries.” The politi-cal pressure exerted on staff by the board in the famous case of the 1997loan to South Korea—where the staff changed the technical assumptionsabout the rollover rate “in order to present the board with a program thatwas fully financed”—happily seems to have been a rare event. Neverthe-less, Fund officials, while regarded as competent and efficient, do notentirely escape the charge that they are sometimes excessively influencedby the officials and policies of the countries with whom they negotiate.

Copolovitch has some interesting reflections on policy issues that domi-nate current discussions about strengthening the Fund’s financing andgovernance. He argues convincingly that even after its recent capitalreplenishment, the Fund “may no longer have the resources to play the roleof crisis lender in global markets that it fulfilled in the 1980s and 1990s.”New ways of leveraging private finance (“burden sharing”) are needed, buta workable model is hard to find. Copelovitch is skeptical that internalgovernance reforms (modifications to “chairs and shares”) that wouldamplify the vote of developing countries at the expense of the Europeancountries will have a substantial effect on lending policies. He also doubtsthat geopolitical factors relating to political or military conflicts have gen-erally played a significant role in the Fund’s lending decisions, whileconceding that their influence in countries such as Turkey and Russia,which were outside the scope of the study, may have been greater.

Overall, this book provides an excellent survey of an underresearchedfield. It is a pleasure to read—especially the excellent case studies—and itis well balanced in its analysis and policy conclusions. Nevertheless, thestudy includes little discussion of some important policy issues that havearisen in light of the current global financial crisis: the capital replenish-ment of the IMF and its important role in mitigating the effects of thecrisis, the possibility of establishing a European Monetary Fund and itsimplications for the delicate political equilibria of the Fund, and theincreasingly important role of the European Union in the lending pro-grams for Greece and other European countries affected by the crisis. Nordoes the study discuss the implications of changes in the Fund’s policy onconditionality that were introduced in 2009, including the new notion ofex ante conditionality. While the Fund has not released many documentsrelating to its board decisions in the post-2003 period, some narrativeanalysis of these issues would have been appreciated.

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Despite these qualifications, the book is strongly recommended to mas-ter’s and PhD students of economics, finance, and international relations,and to officials working at a policy level in international organizations,financial institutions, and national governments in both advanced anddeveloping countries.

RICHARD ALLEN, World Bank

Wealth, Health and Democracy in East Asia and Latin America. James W. McGuire.New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 406 pp. $30.00 (paper).

Wealth, Health and Democracy is an excellent study of the determinants ofsocial policy and development outcomes in the global south. JamesMcGuire focuses specifically on infant mortality as the key indicator of“capability expansion,” which he sees as the “core of human develop-ment” among the very poor in developing world settings (p. 14). McGuiresituates his broadly comparative study against the prevailing conventionalwisdom that economic development—and thus socioeconomic indicatorsof development such as gross domestic product per capita, income equal-ity, and so on—predicts better health outcomes. Chapter 2 provides alarge-N analysis of this conventional wisdom, and what McGuire finds isthat while the “wealthier is healthier” argument goes a long way inexplaining variations in infant mortality outcomes across nations and overtime, it fails to capture the whole story. A fair degree of the explaining,McGuire argues, is attributable to the presence and quality of basic andrelatively inexpensive health and social services targeting the very poor,and he finds that the effects of such services are positive with respect toreducing infant mortality “even in the context of difficult economic cir-cumstances” (p. 290). McGuire cites several instances during which infantmortality rates steeply declined amid periods of low growth and highlevels of inequality, contradicting the economic determinism of thewealthier is healthier perspective.

Chapters 3–10 constitute the core of the book’s qualitative analysis.Each chapter is devoted to a single case study. McGuire draws on nationalexamples in both Latin America (Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil)and East Asia (Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia). The indi-vidual chapters provide detailed historical accounts of socioeconomicdevelopment in each case, and also the evolution of specific health andsocial service policies in education, family planning, the provision of safewater and sanitation, primary health care, and nutrition. The chapters arestructured similarly (i.e., parallel headings in each of them), which resultsin the narrative being a bit wooden in places but which nonethelessfacilitates a tight comparative analysis of eight complex cases. The evi-dence that McGuire compiles is convincing. The quantitative analysiscombined with the extraordinarily rich empirical case studies is masterfulsocial science. The book is a must-read for those concerned about

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development, and for scholars more generally who wish to learn andteach good social science.

The implications of Wealth, Health and Democracy are powerful andprovocative. The insights gained from this study are plenty. By unpackingthe monolithic idea of the welfare state, McGuire teaches us that in fact thesocial policies that have the most impact in the context of the global southare those that are inexpensive, accessible in terms of know-how, and thusfeasible. He shows that the expansion and even the universalization ofhealth insurance, for instance, are less consequential for reducing infantmortality and that if we are to take seriously the life chances of the poorestof the poor, we would do better by targeting basic social services such asthe supervision of nutrition, the provision of milk, the funding of primaryeducation, and the creation of rural primary health-care outposts.McGuire demonstrates how preventative measures ought not to be sacri-ficed for more expensive curative ones. He shows us that aggregate socialspending, the typical metric for determining the size of the welfare state,bears little relationship with infant mortality and long-term survival ratesin the developing world.

Wealth, Health and Democracy does not just explain how infant mortalityrates are reduced in Southern contexts. McGuire’s political economicanalysis provides a compelling explanation of why governments choose todevelop and make accessible basic social services (and why not). In theconcluding chapter, he makes it clear that bureaucratic initiative andinternational influences are important mechanisms through which deci-sions are executed. However, what McGuire is most concerned with is thecentral role that democracy plays in the decision-making process. What ismost illuminating in his argument is that democracy is critical not only forits instrumental electoral imperatives, but that the presence and deepen-ing of civil society, a free press, a pluralist discourse, and a more abstractnotion of political legitimacy over the longer term feed into this complexprocess. As McGuire nicely concludes, “democracy promotes the publicprovision of basic social services, not only through the short-term mecha-nism of electoral incentives, but also through long-term effects like theratcheting up of legal rights, the empowerment of communities and theevolution of expectations” (p. 299).

The book can be mined for even deeper, more underdeveloped insightsinto the development process. No doubt others will further explore someof these insights. What stands out, in my mind, is how the study, like somany others devoted to policy and policy analysis, is centrally focused onoutputs, or put another way, the supply side of social policy. There is anexpectation that so long as basic social services are provided, then theywill be utilized. But as McGuire points out in his analysis of the Thai healthcard for low-income families, even when ample measures are supplied,there might not be demand. In Thailand, the take-up rate for the healthcard was low because people were either unaware, unable to afford thetransaction costs associated with seeking otherwise accessible health care,

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or they simply chose not to use the card “because they did not like to beclassified as low income” (p. 241). What this suggests is that though thesupply of basic services, as McGuire argues so convincingly, is a signifi-cant part of what is going on here, we must also examine how the decisionamong the very poor to demand or adopt or utilize such services in thefirst place is determined. This may go a long way in helping us understandwhat McGuire rightly sees to be the crux of the development problem,which is to do a better job of translating what are obviously feasiblesolutions across different national settings.

JOSEPH WONG, University of Toronto

Political Competition, Partisanship, and Policy Making in Latin American Public Utili-ties. Maria Victoria Murillo. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.292 pp. $86.00 (cloth).

The question of whether political parties affect public policies has beenaround for a long time. Many answers have been provided depending onthe countries, the time period, the policy field, or the type of evidence (e.g.,manifestos, budgets, outputs) under study. While a number of authorshave supported the idea that parties do matter, the current growing con-sensus would seem to point toward a view in which political parties havea rather limited influence on policies. Globalization and the spread ofsimilar policy ideas, the end of “adversarial” politics and the raise of“catch all” parties, and the increasing technical/regulatory complexityof policymaking processes would all seem to imply that despite left–rightpreferences and ideological backgrounds, all parties tend to the “center,”with the result that they all design and implement similar policies. But isthat really the case?

In an impressive new book, Maria Victoria Murillo shows that politicalparties still matter, and they matter a lot in terms of when and howpolicies are adopted, designed, and implemented. Political Competition,Partisanship, and Policy Making in Latin American Public Utilities offers acomprehensive analysis of how the region’s electricity and telecommuni-cations regimes have been radically transformed in recent decades.Against the commonly shared view that states that globalization, particu-larly through pressures exerted by international organizations, has led toregulatory convergence, Murillo offers a more nuanced and original per-spective. While it is true that regulatory reforms spread across LatinAmerican countries in a very short period of time, she argues that “politi-cal competition explained the timing of privatization—and reform adop-tion more generally—whereas the partisan orientation of incumbentsshaped the content or design of these policies” (pp. 3–4).

The book is an ambitious effort to bridge a variety of literatures, theo-ries, and methods, and represents an outstanding example of whatmodern political science is about. Comparative politics, political economy,

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and regulation theory are all skillfully combined in Murillo’s analysis,which also draws on insights from current historical institutionalism andpolicy diffusion debates. Her theoretical propositions about the need tolook at regulatory reforms across time/policy stages are insightful andhighly relevant. As Murillo shows, explanations about the adoption ofregulatory reforms need to look at levels of political competition, as wellas the decisions made by political incumbents in response to the chal-lenges posed by credible opposition parties. However, in order to fullyunderstand why regulatory reforms result in either “market conforming”or “market controlling” conditions (pp. 20–23), Murillo states that we alsoneed to look at “time 2” (with policy adoption being “time 1”). Time 2 iswhen the preferences and affiliations of the governing parties define thecontents of the new regulations, and thus their future implementation andpotential impacts on social redistribution. All of Murillo’s theoretical state-ments are carefully supported by an interesting mixed-methods researchstrategy, which combines statistical models on political competition andpolicy adoption (chapter 2), cross-national comparisons for assessing par-tisan influence on regulatory contents (chapter 3), a cross-sectoral multi-level policy analysis (chapter 6), and three detailed case studies on thereform paths followed by Chile, Argentina, and Mexico (chapters 4 and 5).

As remarked above, Murillo has written an excellent work, but also (asnoted by Evelyne Huber on the back cover) a rather complex one. Thebook is well structured and argued. However, the elaborate set of theo-retical statements, as well as the technical description of the nationalregulatory frameworks, does not make for easy reading, particularly forthose who might not possess some background knowledge on the topicscovered here. This, of course, is not necessarily a “weakness,” but justsomething to be kept in mind when approaching the book. On the otherhand, one could certainly point at some aspects of the study that might notbe completely convincing (at least for some readers). For example, Murillobuilds her analysis on two broad types of political coalitions: “formerpopulists who pragmatically converted to the new creed [and] adoptedmarket-oriented policies” and “right-wing true believers [who] chosemarket-conforming regulatory content” (p. 29). While the typology isobviously kept simple for the sake of argumentation, the labels used (andthe assumptions from which they depart) might be more problematic thanexpected. As Murillo states, in the case of Chile “[t]he conversion of theConcertación . . . was not only driven by pragmatism, but also, even beforethe transition, the left-wing parties in the coalition had undertaken aprocess of ideological renovation that included the acceptance of marketmechanisms” (p. 150). Similarly, in the case of Mexico, it might be a bit tooextreme to consider Salinas and his economic team (and particularlyZedillo and his cabinet) as “converted former populists.” While they allbelonged to the old “Party of the Revolution,” these policymakers wereabsolutely convinced that the State should play a different economic andregulatory role in order to modernize Mexico. So perhaps they were not

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“right wing,” but they certainly were “true believers.” In both cases, thetypological boundaries seem to become a bit blurry; at the same time, theexamples also show that “ideas” might be as relevant as “interests,” or atleast a bit more than Murillo’s analysis suggests. A second issue relates tothe question of how partisanship influences regulatory contents. Again, avery simple point in principle: Left/right parties promote regulatory con-tents in accordance to their left/right ideologies. In fact, Murillo does anexcellent job in showing how national regulations vary across countriesand fall into her proposed categories (p. 229). Yet while the idea is prettystraightforward, it is based on a premise of partisan homogeneity/discipline that is probably less so, at least in the national experiences understudy. In the Mexican case, as described by Murillo, some of the strongestattacks that the Zedillo government faced when seeking electricity priva-tization came from “enemies within.” How do we actually “square” thepartisan “left/right” influence on regulatory contents exerted by the gov-erning party, when the latter faced internal contradictory “left/right”views? In a similar sense, Chile’s “Concertación de Partidos por la Democ-racia,” which governed the country during 10 years following the end ofthe dictatorship, was integrated by political parties from both the left andthe center-right. How should we classify the Concertación’s influence onregulatory contents and redistribution on the left–right continuum? Withwhat consequences to its various members’ ideological profiles? What,then, about the idea of different partisan ideologies leading to differentpolicy alternatives?

Despite the former points, Political Competition, Partisanship, and PolicyMaking in Latin American Public Utilities will undoubtedly become a keyreference for those interested in better understanding how politics affectregulatory adoption and contents. More than just an expert analysis of theelectricity and telecommunications fields, or a detailed discussion of utili-ties reforms in Latin America, Maria Victoria Murillo has made a substan-tial theoretical contribution to our knowledge about the way politicalparties continue to matter and influence policymaking in a globalizedworld.

MAURICIO I. DUSSAUGE LAGUNA, London School of Economics and PoliticalScience

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