As Kenneth Roberts (p. 85) notes in his contribution to this book, while there have been Left governments before in Latin America, in its breadth, depth and duration the post-1998 Left turn was without historical precedent in the region. This occurrence makes an evaluation of its legacies both compelling and fraught with difficulties. The number of countries ruled by Left and Centre-Left governments in the early 2000s makes it possible to aggregate region-wide results and draw generalisations. But differences between the Left governments in some policy areas were wider than those between left-wing and right-wing ones, and national contexts provided different sets of constraints and opportunities. There is also the question of what to compare and how to compare. Should comparisons be between left-wing and right-wing governments or between the Left government and their predecessors? That the authors managed to produce a meaningful account of the achievements and limitations of the Left governments in question is no mean achievement.
In Chapter 1, François Montambault, Manuel Balán and Philip Oxhorn set up the conceptual lens that will be used for comparative purposes. The authors note that Left turn governments came into power with the promise of deepening and widening citizenship and the question they ask (p. 18) addresses this pledge: how did the governments of the Left turn perform in their efforts to deliver on the promise of a more inclusive citizenship? Answers to the question in subsequent chapters cover the impact of Left governments on democratic institutions and on a variety of political and socio-economic rights.
On the question of democratic responsiveness, Roberts (p. 87) argues that leftist parties in office after 2003 had greater latitude to ‘govern from the left’ than their predecessors and that the highest re-election rates of incumbent leftist parties vis-à-vis their centre-right counterparts between 2000 and mid-2017 suggests that governing Left parties found ways to respond to popular demands at a time when fiscal and balance of payments constrains had been relaxed, creating new opportunities for experimentation with heterodox and redistributive policies. He further notes that Left governments in oil-rich countries and collapsed party systems had more leeway to deviate from neoliberal orthodoxy and enact more generous social programmes than those which faced more structured political and economic constrains, resulting in different sets of achievements and disappointments but also rising questions about sustainability.
Several chapters scrutinise the legacies of Left governments in specific policy areas. These include participatory democracy (Benjamin Goldfrank), social constitutionalism (Nathalia Sandoval-Rojas and Daniel Brinks), Indigenous autonomies (Roberta Rice), human rights and memory politics (Elizabeth Jelin and Celina Van Dembroucke), gender and conditional cash transfers (Nora Nagels), domestic workers’ rights (Merike Blofield), sexual citizenship (Jordi Díez), sustainable development (Eve Bratman) and urban crime (Gabriel Kessler). Accounts of the different policy fields show significant variations in terms of what was achieved by the Left turn, but the overall balance is that achievements were limited and uneven. In two areas that were particularly relevant for the Left, participatory democracy and sustainable development, the authors are particularly critical about the chasm between rhetoric and reality. Regarding participatory democracy, Goldfrank (p. 154) claims that advances in the quality of citizenship were limited to certain groups at certain times and certain places rather than generalised. He concludes that a significant opportunity to transform citizenship through building robust participatory institutions has been lost. Concerning the environment, Bratman (Chapter 11) contrasts the rhetoric of protection of the environment and sustainable development with the granting of oil exploration permits in order to cash the rents of extractive industries. Bratman's arguments are also evident in the tensions between Indigenous autonomies and the resource-dependent, state-led model of development pursued by Left turn government analysed by Rice in Chapter 6 and in the limitations that the model imposed on participatory politics (Goldfrank, Chapter 5).
The concluding chapters by Olivier Dabène (Chapter 13) and Jared Abbot and Steven Levitsky (Chapter 14) make a rather sobering assessment of the Left turn legacies. Dabène acknowledges the positive changes in the region over the past 15 years in areas such as reducing inequality and poverty. Yet, he doubts that the uses of the ‘Left’ as an analytical category allows for an accurate understanding of the political drivers of the changes in question. Specifically, he claims that the Left turn did not significantly change the political offer, that the Left/Right divide does not make much sense for Latin American voters, and that there were very few policy areas where the Left actually made a lasting impact (p. 351).
The Left's contributions to the expansion of citizenship are empirically tested by Abbot and Levitsky in the excellent concluding chapter. The authors seek to determine the Left's impact on citizenship by disaggregating it into liberal democratic, social, and participatory rights. Their empirical analysis found that on social and participatory rights the degree of rights extension was greater in countries led by left-of-centre governments than under those ruled by the Right, although differences were only marginal on participatory rights. On aggregate, however, they found no significant difference in citizens’ rights extensions between countries governed by the Left and those governed by the Right, as genuine gains on social rights and welfare and marginal gains on participatory rights combined with an erosion of liberal democratic rights, particularly in countries ruled by so-called radical Left governments, such as Venezuela, which brings into attention Maxwell Cameron's claim (p. 46) that the core principles of liberalism retain considerable emancipatory potential on the condition that freedom is reinterpreted as political and social empowerment of excluded sector of the community rather than as non-interference.
Although the book findings should not surprise scholars of Latin American politics, it still provides a rich and nuanced analysis of the Left governments’ legacies. Perhaps the policy areas could have included chapters on welfare regimes and post neoliberal development models. Also, the book's cross-national approach needs to be complemented by country case studies to provide a clearer picture of the Left governments’ achievements and limitations. But as the region continues to be divided between left- and right-wing governments the book provides valuable lessons about the legacies of the Left turn and about the challenges for current and future Left governments.
