Fernando Sánchez's careful, well-researched work presents a systematic examination of the process of political dealignment in Latin America through a detailed case study of Costa Rica's changing party system. This relatively common phenomenon of declining partisan attachment to political parties has been examined and well addressed in the political science literature for advanced western democratic countries. The author builds on these existing theories to present a persuasive, theoretically sophisticated explanation for the decline of partisan support for Costa Rica's oldest political party, the Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN), and simultaneously offer insights into dealignment processes in other Latin American countries.

The central contribution of the book is that it both identifies the process and extent of the erosion of political party identification (dealignment) in Costa Rica and generates a theoretical explanation for that process that melds aspects of the two dominant theoretical approaches (political and sociological) used to understand dealignment in advanced democratic countries. Sánchez argues that to understand the Latin American variation of dealignment, serious consideration needs to be paid to the role of personalistic leaders (personalismo) in generating party support and cohesion. Personalistic leaders, he notes, are an important aspect of party loyalty in Latin America, but only of marginal importance in advanced democratic countries. The author argues that while personalistic leaders are central to cementing partisan support for parties, their deaths contribute to the dealignment process as party supporters lose their ties to the party. This process has been exacerbated in Costa Rica by subsequent poor governance by their namesake sons.

The book is structured in five parts; Part One lays out the parameters of Costa Rica's electoral changes since the late 1990s and details the dominant theoretical approaches to explaining political dealignment in developed democracies. The second part of the book places Costa Rica's political parties in their historical context up to the short 1948 civil war, which is generally accepted as the beginning of the country's contemporary political system. The second chapter in this part examines the institutional underpinnings of the country's post-civil war, stable two-party system. Part Three of the book demonstrates the extent of partisan dealignment in Costa Rica and identifies its origins in the build-up to the 1998 presidential and legislative elections. The final two parts of the book contain three chapters and offer a compelling alternative explanation for the dealignment process and draw conclusions that are readily applicable to many other similar cases in Latin America.

Much of the book is an excellent and very detailed case study of the PLN. Although the PLN promotes itself as a social democratic party, partisan personalistic ties to its founder, José Figueres, and subsequently to his son, José Maria Figueres, run deep (Chapter Three). The party was created by the winning forces in the aftermath of the 1948 Civil War, a war sparked by electoral fraud rather than class or ethnic differences. Consequently, partisan loyalty has historically been defined not by class, but by loyalty to the winners (Figueres) or losers of the war (Rafael Angel Calderón). Indeed, in Costa Rica the names of the two major parties' founding leaders are often synonyms for the parties themselves; voters frequently identify themselves as Figueristas (PLN) or Calderonistas (PUSC) rather than by party name.

Sánchez presents evidence to dismiss the role of electoral laws (writ large) as a cause of the pronounced dealignment of Costa Rican politics; instead, he accepts the common view that those electoral laws have facilitated the cementation of the two-party system (Chapter Four). It might transpire that the creation of a constitutional chamber of the Supreme Court (Sala Constitucional) in 1989 may have provided an important institutional facilitation of the dealignment process. The actions of the country's constitutional court, one of the most active courts in the hemisphere, appear to have weakened the legislative powers of the major parties while simultaneously enhancing the policy-making influence of smaller parties in the congress. The increasing power granted to small parties to influence policy might have encouraged traditional partisan voters of the dominant parties to throw their support to smaller parties. Voters understand that their votes would not be ‘wasted votes’ due to the increasing policy-making relevance of smaller parties, which may further contribute to the dealignment process.

If the value of a book's insights is that it can explain (and predict) events that take place after the book manuscript is completed, then this is an extremely valuable book. The book's story of party system dealignment and the breakdown of Costa Rica's two-party system up to the 2002 general election is made still more salient by events after that election. The 2006 general election revealed a continued major decline in electoral support for the country's traditional parties and increasing abstention rates. The 2006 election results strengthen the book's conclusions about declining PLN partisan support and demonstrate an almost total collapse of the PUSC party support. The rout of the PUSC during the 2006 election illustrates that its partisan support was weakened even further than that of the PLN: PUSC electoral support declined from approximately 40 per cent in during the 2002 general election (being the largest party in the Legislative Assembly), to less than 4 per cent for its presidential candidate (less than 8 per cent in the Assembly) in the 2006 election. The desertion of party support was no small part the result of two consecutive PUSC governments that were very unpopular and the arrest of two of the party's former leaders in major corruption scandals.

The transformation of a dissertation into a book is often a difficult one, but in this case it was clearly successful. Sánchez's book is a must-read for scholars of Costa Rican and Latin American politics as well as for students of political parties in advanced industrial democracies, as it presents a compelling explanation for the major transformation of Costa Rica's political party system and offers significant insights into Latin America's region-wide dealignment process. Fernando Sanchez's book is peerless in the literature on Costa Rican political parties.