Audacious Reforms: Institutional Invention and Democracy in Latin America By Merilee S. Grindle. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 2000. 269p. $45.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.

Extract

Merillee Grindle addresses three questions: Why would rational politicians choose to give up power? What accounts for the selection of some institutions rather than others? What are the political consequences of the creation of new institutions? She studies cases of decentralizing political reforms in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Argentina. Her case studies are loosely guided by eleven hypotheses deduced from three schools of thought. The schools to which she refers in an introductory and concluding chapter are rational choice, comparative institutionalism, and new institutionalism (the latter has two subvariants: transaction costs and institutional design). The theoretical perspectives are apparently not equally useful across questions, as new institutionalism is not used to deduce hypotheses on why politicians would choose to reform, and rational choice is not applied to the reasons some some institutional changes are chosen over others.