The replacement of a “stable” democracy with an elected self-proclaimed “revolutionary” government—especially in a major petroleum-exporting country—demands the attention of comparative politics. Thus, this volume is a welcome addition to the rather thin body of scholarship on Venezuela. Comprised of essays by several leading students of Venezuelan politics, it locates the preconditions for Hugo Chavez's rise in the vulnerabilities of the previous regime. Some chapters, including the conclusion, also attempt to explain the nature of the new government under Chavez. However, given the origins of the book in conference papers from 2000, the latter task is quite underdeveloped. A fuller analysis of the nature and structure of the Chavez government, now into the final year of its first full constitutional term, would have made the book all the more valuable. Nonetheless, its question about democracy's “unraveling” is of great importance.

Unfortunately, the book does not provide a convincing explanation for why Venezuelan democracy failed. Analytical precision is hard to locate in characterizations of a political system as “an institutionalized limited democracy located in the gray zone” between liberal democracy and outright dictatorship (Jennifer McCoy, p. 294). Both the “Punto Fijo” regime—as the 1958–98 system is commonly called, after the house where its founding pact was signed—and Chavez's “Fifth Republic” are characterized by this same vacuous concept of the “gray zone.” It is not anymore helpful that the introductory chapter (in pp. 6–8) orients the volume around three rather opposing “theoretical approaches.” These are, “structural” (i.e., political economy), “institutional” (understood narrowly as being about “political choices”), and “cultural” (political orientations and learning). The editors do not only their readers but also their own contributors a disservice by not synthesizing among these traditions or imposing a preference for one of them. In fact, very few of the chapters explicitly build on what is unveiled as the “Argument of the Book” (p. 6); only in the concluding chapter is there an attempt to recount the applicability of the approaches. (Apparently all three are equally applicable!)

Contained within the volume's pages is a wealth of information—much of it not readily available elsewhere—about the trajectory of politics in Venezuela. For instance, perhaps the best chapter, by Jose Molina, provides one of the most succinct accounts available of the origins of the Punto Fijo political parties and the dynamics of the party system. At the height of the “institutionalization” of the party system (1973–93), the two main parties expressed almost all the organized interests of society, aside from business, which was represented in a more ad hoc manner. Yet by 1998, a former lieutenant colonel who had tried to overthrow that party system by force six years earlier would be elected, Molina notes, precisely because he was the candidate who most consistently rejected any role for those parties. This is the essence of the puzzle of institutional decay that must be explained, and while the underlying conditions for that decay may be found in either political economy or culture, the story is fundamentally one of failed institutions.

Indeed, the editors recognize this primacy of institutions when they speak of the question of how variously described forms of “limited” democracy might become institutionalized (p. 2), how the Punto Fijo regime's institutions remained “exclusionary” (p. 7), and so on. Yet notwithstanding the brief introductory chapter's repeated references to institutions and their failure, few of the chapters explore these themes explicitly. Aside from Molina's chapter on party systems and a very informative one by Harold Trinkunas on the military, institutions are largely absent. There is no chapter that explains the role of congress, and subnational governments and the judiciary are mentioned only briefly. Yet to understand democracy's failure, we must understand why these checks on executive power—institutions that were present all along—were insufficient to secure democratic accountability.

Instead, the bulk of the volume consists of a set of chapters on “actors making political demands,” and a second set entitled “policy-making and its consequences.” Yet how these actors' demands are aggregated and turned into policy is not explored, thus leaving the reader at a loss to determine whether Punto Fijo's “representative democracy” was either. The format of narrowly focused topical chapters makes it challenging for the reader to digest what are too often chronological accounts—thus always resetting the clock to 1958 or earlier—into a coherent explanation for why democratic accountability failed so badly that a coup plotter was freely elected.

Of course, the very notion of “limited democracy” being institutionalized is an oxymoron. If democracy is limited, the implication is that there is no effective accountability to the electorate, but if an alternative font of accountability is likewise not institutionalized, then how can the regime itself be, in any meaningful sense? It would seem that authors such as David Myers might need to rethink Venezuela's former status as “one of Latin America's oldest and most respected democracies” (p. 24), especially if the regime's elites considered their hold on power “precarious” (p. 26). Moreover, if the political parties that defined that regime were as discredited as Molina and other authors note, then the claim by both Molina and McCoy that the prior institutionalization of party competition allows a democratic culture to survive Chavez's personalization and centralization of authority is called into question.

A contrary interpretation of the previous regime is hinted at by McCoy (p. 268), that the parties and their affiliated organizations were so rigid that they could not incorporate new interests that arose in civil society (especially among the urban poor, as noted by Damarys Canache). This interpretation implies that the parties themselves—if not democracy per se—were overinstitutionalized, in the sense of being too rigid to adapt and maintain accountability to the electorate (as must be the case in a democracy). It is, moreover, possible that the new “Bolivarian” movement backing Chavez, and penetrating civil society, is the basis for a new (and, if it succeeds, potentially quasi-totalitarian) form of accountability—most likely not the “direct” democracy Chavez promises. These are profoundly important questions for understanding the failures of democracy and the rise of alternatives—not only in Venezuela. The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in Venezuela provides ample information and food for thought about such questions, even if it fails to explore them from within any coherent framework.