Mandates and Democracy

Normative theories of democracy affirm that one of the most important advantages of such a regime is its responsiveness to citizens' preferences. Economic theories of democracy also predict that politicians have incentives to answer the median voter's concerns due to the electoral competition for power. However, the empirical evidence around the world shows that democratically-elected governments sometimes violate their own campaign promises. That is, once in power, after have been offering a specific platform that satisfies most of the electorate, the new elected authorities decide to implement a different set of policies. This book explains under what circumstances such a betrayal of mandates occurs and with what consequences. Stokes takes into account forty-two presidential elections in Latin America from 1982 to 1995 and focuses her analysis on the twelve cases where a dramatic change of policy took place. She uses statistical tools to test different hypotheses about the main determinants of policy switches. Her most surprising conclusion is that "governments that want nothing more than to promote the welfare of their constituents may sometimes not only renege on campaign pronouncements, they may in fact dissimulate in campaigns and then switch to unpopular policies" (p. 5). By defining political representation as the behavior of politicians aiming to maximize the welfare of their constituents, Stokes challenges scholars that explain policy switches as the attempt of rent-seekers to take advantage of the asymmetry of information between the voters (principal) and the office holders (agents). This latter approach would support the skeptical view of market-oriented reforms as policies that favor the interests of the rich. But she argues that "neoliberalism by surprise" is the result of a dissimulation- strategy that aims to solve the problem of conflicting beliefs between politicians and voters. What she calls "efficiency-oriented" policies (i.e. liberalization) are unpopular for voters because they do not have enough information about the benefits of such policies. Thus, politicians propose "security-oriented" policies (i.e. protectionist) to get into office and then switch. The central argument of this book is that voters care about economic performance and not too much about policies. It stresses the role of beliefs and uncertainty in shaping politicians and voters behavior. For instance, the author claims that "politicians' choices of economic policy are shaped by ideology and technical beliefs, as well as by the desire to win votes" (p. 56). Taking into account the conflicting beliefs of politicians and voters, her theoretical discussion about the tensions between the idea of popular mandates and the independence of representatives does not exclude the possibility of a government that decides to violate mandates to govern well because has more knowledge and information than its constituents, and expects that at