In Regime Support Beyond the Balance Sheet: Participation and Policy Performance in Latin America, Matthew Rhodes-Purdy uses the puzzle of regime support in Chile and Venezuela as a weapon to challenge the dominance of rationalist accounts of democratic regime support. Until the early 2010s, levels of regime support in Chile and Venezuela were outliers for the region, with unusually low support in Chile despite strong policy performance, and high support in Venezuela even with the poor policy performance of the Hugo Chávez government. Rhodes-Purdy argues that participatory opportunities, or what he calls “citizen autonomy,” were responsible for the difference. Drawing from participatory democratic theory (à la Carole Pateman and Benjamin Barber) and social psychological theories of organizational justice, he argues that citizen satisfaction with democracy depends crucially on perceptions about procedure and not just policy outcomes: perceptions are key. Rhodes-Purdy admits that most citizens lack the desire or the ability to actually participate, but theories of organizational justice require only that there be opportunities for participation that help people feel empowered. Because Chávez’s government provided these opportunities, even in partisan forms limited to the local level, it enjoyed a cushion of legitimacy that protected it from its policy mistakes, at least as long as Chávez was alive to supplement these participatory opportunities with his populist rhetoric and charisma. Chile’s post-transition elitist government, which shielded technocratic policy making from popular input, lacked this buffer and suffered from a growing sense of malaise, despite exemplary policy performance for the region. The implication is that theories of democratic regime stability should not focus exclusively on citizens’ material preferences; psychologically rooted, normative preferences regarding procedures are also important.
Rhodes-Purdy fleshes out this argument in the first three chapters and then uses the rest of the book for empirical tests. In chapter 4, he provides a large-N study of four waves of the Latin American Public Opinion Project’s Americas Barometer. He models the relationship among three sets of attitudes: regime-based efficacy (RBE; his indicator of perceived participatory opportunities), perceptions of policy performance, and regime support. He finds that RBE has the stronger association with regime support and moderates the effect of perceived performance (performance matters more when RBE is low, suggesting that RBE insulates regime support from bad performance). He checks these results by running a similar analysis on ANES data and by estimating the effect of an objective measure of participatory institutions on his model.
Chapter 5 provides a case study of participatory institutions in Venezuela under Chávez. Rhodes-Purdy argues that Venezuela represents a case of “participatory populism” in which a populist movement enacted participatory institutions only at the local level, where they could be contained and co-opted by the movement leaders. This solves what Rhodes-Purdy calls the “populist dilemma,” or the conflict between populism’s participatory message and the concentration of power in a leader who claims to embody that will. Rhodes-Purdy is at his best in describing the workings of the Communal Councils (CCs), the main participatory project until Chávez’s death in 2013. He draws from several studies on the CCs that highlight their combination of local control over CC decision making with state control over funding. He also analyzes survey data from the Americas Barometer in Venezuela, showing that Venezuelans’ experience of participation in the CCs boosted regime support among Chávez supporters.
Chapter 6 explores the Chilean case by showing first that economic performance since the transition to democracy fails to explain the country’s much-noted popular dissatisfaction with the party system; most of Chile’s governance indicators are the highest in the region, and satisfaction with parties is actually strongest among the poorest segments of society. The culprit is the protected democracy left over from the military dictatorship. Electoral rules and technocratic decision making in government agencies, both established under the Pinochet government, shielded political elites from popular input in decision making while raising barriers to entry to new participants. Rhodes-Purdy tests these claims through an analysis of a 2012 nationwide public opinion survey, an experiment (n = 147) on Chilean university students, and a qualitative analysis of a participatory initiative by a Santiago municipality. He finds that confidence in political parties is closely linked to (the lack of) participatory opportunities and that creating participatory opportunities dramatically improves citizens’ support for the political system.
Overall, Rhodes-Purdy’s spirited rebuttal of rationalist accounts of regime support is a welcome addition to the literature, and he makes an important contribution by applying social psychological theories of organizational justice, as well as more familiar theories of democratic participation. His attempt to test these with studies of these two puzzling cases is largely persuasive and will speak especially to scholars studying the region.
However, the book could have gone further in two directions that would have made a stronger contribution. First, although Rhodes-Purdy is careful to specify key terms such as “regime support,” he tends to invent new terms or use old ones in ways that readers will find puzzling and that limit his ability to speak to a larger audience. For example, he labels restrictive, nonparticipatory models “liberal democracy,” despite citing liberal democratic theorists such as John Stuart Mill and Robert Dahl to buttress his claims about democratic participation. The term “neoliberal” might have been a better choice. In addition, despite some obvious theoretical overlap with Hanna Pitkin’s work on representation, Rhodes-Purdy fails to cite or speak to her fourfold model, drawing only on the concept of substantive representation, which he rightly argues is a limited basis for ensuring regime support. Pitkin’s concept of procedural representation seems similar to his concepts of procedural support/opportunities for participation, and one wonders (especially given the importance of Chávez’s populist rhetoric) whether Pitkin’s descriptive and symbolic representation are doing some of the causal work as well.
Second, the empirical tests in the book are sometimes thin, giving it a rushed feel that leaves important questions unanswered. For example, it is not clear why Rhodes-Purdy’s comparative analysis of regime support in chapter 4 does not control for whether respondents voted for the incumbent; in this regard, the analysis of Venezuela (which is transparent about the impact of partisanship) is more persuasive. Likewise, readers may wish that Rhodes-Purdy had brought in more objective measures of participatory opportunities and that he had spent more time modeling RBE itself. Furthermore, although I found the argument for Chile intuitively appealing, each of the three tests in the chapter is weak. As Rhodes-Purdy notes, the public opinion survey measures perceptions of participatory opportunities through confidence in parties, the experiment is performed on very small student samples, and the qualitative study of the participatory initiative lacks a pretest. Finally, many technical details in the book are missing. Chapter 4 lacks specifications for its final robustness check, and most of the Venezuela and Chile case studies fail to include model specifications and question wording. It would have helped to see some of the confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling rendered graphically.
Despite these weak points, this book gives a persuasive account of recent events in Chile and Venezuela with broad implications. As stated in the conclusion, these implications help us understand more recent developments in both countries (positive in Chile, negative in Venezuela), and they speak to the rise of populism today. And as Rhodes-Purdy suggests, politicians who try to shield themselves from voter participation to prevent populist mobilization may be causing the very thing they hoped to avoid.
