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OverviewLatin America’s flirtation with neoliberal economic restructuring in the 1980s and 1990s (the so-called Washington Consensus strategy) had the effect of increasing income inequality throughout the region. The aim of this economic policy was in part to create the conditions for stable democracy by ensuring efficient economic use of resources, both human and capital, but the widening gap between rich and poor threatened to undermine political stability. At the heart of the dilemma faced by these new democracies is the question of accountability: Are all citizens equally capable of holding the government accountable if it does not represent their interests? In this book, Michelle Taylor-Robinson investigates both the formal institutions of democracy (such as electoral rules and the design of the legislative and executive branches) and informal institutions (such as the nomination procedures of political parties and patron-client relationships) to see what incentives legislators have to pay attention to the needs of poor people and thereby adequately represent their interests. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson (Associate Professor , Texas A and M)Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press Imprint: Pennsylvania State University Press Dimensions: Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.40cm , Length: 22.90cm Weight: 0.513kg ISBN: 9780271037509ISBN 10: 0271037504 Pages: 248 Publication Date: 27 October 2010 Audience: Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: To order  Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us. Table of ContentsContents List of Tables List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments 1. Institutions, Poverty, and Democratic Consolidation 2. Theorizing Representation and Accountability in a Context of Poverty 3. Institutions and Poor People’s Confidence in Their Legislature 4. Evolution of Institutions: An Overview of Honduras’s Political History 5. Institutions and Incentives in Honduras’s Third-Wave Democracy 6. Institutions, Incentives, and Roles: Legislators’ Identities About Their Job 7. Roles, Attitudes, and Actions: Does Anyone Represent Poor People? 8. Do the Poor Count in Latin American Democracies? Appendix: Coding Informal Roles References IndexReviewsMost theories of democratic accountability ignore that poor voters as electoral principals encounter special handicaps in aligning elected agents with their preferences. Moreover, if elected politicians deliver clientelistic goods or services to their constituencies, received wisdom considers this a form of voter co-optation that offers few benefits to its recipients and distracts them from their agents accountability on policy. In her book, Taylor-Robinson challenges both premises. Clientelistic exchange may sometimes be the only game in town to satisfy poor people, and actually it may on occasion deliver meaningful benefits to its target constituencies. The major achievement of Taylor-Robinson s book is to specify institutional and strategic conditions under which the poor may gain a modicum of leverage in clientelistic accountability relations. Voters stand a better chance to avail themselves of clientelistic resources when a multiplicity of parties competes for the support of the poor in an electoral marketplace where voters incur only few costs of changing their partisan affiliation and where open list electoral systems with proportional representation enable poor voters to concentrate their support on individual candidates rather than parties at large. The book tests empirical implications of this argument with a cross-national dataset on poor people s satisfaction with democracy. Taylor-Robinson then goes on to demonstrate the specific conditions that make clientelistic politicians more or less accountable in a detailed, penetrating case study of Honduran politics that makes useful reading even for non-Latin Americanists. Taylor-Robinson s research results in a thought-provoking reassessment of clientelistic partisan relations. It is destined to resonate broadly among students of democratic accountability. Herbert Kitschelt, Duke University Author InformationMichelle M. Taylor-Robinson is Associate Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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