Miguel Angel Latouche, Wolfgang Muno, and Alexandra Gericke, eds. Venezuela – Dimensions of a Crisis: A Perspective on Democratic Backsliding. Cham: Springer, 2023. Tables, figures, index, 214 pp.; hardcover €96.29.

Abstract

The editors' theoretical framework and conceptual discussion is influenced by, and owes a debt of intellectual gratitude to, Guillermo O'Donnell, whose research from the 1990s on explored issues related to the quality of democracy. His final book, Democracy, Agency, and the State: Theory with Comparative Intent (2010), which makes a case for addressing the importance of the state in conceptualizations of democracy, leaves its fingerprints all over this edited volume. Following O'Donnell's work, Cameron and Jaramillo treat democracy, liberalism, and republicanism as three conceptually distinct but interrelated intellectual traditions. As did O'Donnell, they warn against the teleological notion that Latin American democracies are simply immature versions of established democracies in Western Europe and the United States (13). The empirical chapters successfully advance these claims.Aside from its overt references to O'Donnell, the book is also a spiritual successor to Catherine Conaghan and James Malloy's Unsettling Statecraft: Democracy and Neoliberalism in the Central Andes (1994), a comparative study of the politics of neoliberalism in Latin America during the 1980s. But where Conaghan and Malloy focus on the contradictions and difficulties Andean states faced as they made the transition from authoritarianism to civilian rule and neoliberalism, Cameron and Jaramillo's volume explores the continuing challenges to democracy through executive aggrandizement in the region. As they show, this examination is as urgent today as ever.