| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

Consuelo Cruz. Political Culture and Institutional Development in Costa Rica and Nicaragua: World Making in the Tropics. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xvii, 281. $80.00.

This is a dense book of nearly three hundred pages that should be compared to significant contributions along these lines by Jeffery M. Paige, James Mahoney, Deborah J. Yashar, Kirk S. Bowman, Fabrice Edovard Lehoucq, and Robert H. Holden, to mention some of the most notable and recognized names in the U.S. Despite their differences, what Consuelo Cruz and these authors have in common is a commitment to explaining Costa Rica's exceptional twentieth-century political history of stability, democracy, and nonviolent electoral regime transitions in the historical context of a neighborhood of nation-states whose record in these and related processes illustrates little of what is positive in the Costa Rican case. One of the strengths of this book, for which it will be praised, then, is that it focuses on a targeted audience composed of a sophisticated if small community of scholars familiar with a spate of theorizing and dialogue about democracy, regime change, and electoral politics.

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