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Between Tyranny and Anarchy: A History of Democracy in Latin America, 1800-2006. By Paul W. Drake. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii, 330. Map. Tables. Notes. Index. $65.00 cloth; $24.95 paper.
Paul W. Drake has undertaken a daunting task. In a little over 300 pages written in crisp prose, he has managed to tell the story of democracy in Latin America from independence to the present. In an analysis that aims at dismantling the pervasive image of Latin American history as a woeful tale of uninterrupted, monolithic authoritarianism, he suggests the reasons why general theories - Latin America's "pathology of democracy" (p. 129) in the nineteenth century, modernization, dependency, or corporatism in the twentieth - have failed to account for democracy's trajectory in the region. His study is both meticulous and wide-ranging. By focusing on the evolution of various institutional elements - constitutions, elections, the organization and interaction of presidential, legislative, and judiciary powers, and political parties - and...