My review of Lipset & Larkin’s The Democratic Century has just come out in the Spring 2005 issue of the Political Science Quarterly.
Now, they told me that they wouldn’t bother showing me line edits, so I was prepared for it to look a bit different. But they made the first sentence literally incomprehensible — and omitted the last paragraph, which was where I got critical. My bad review turned into a good one without consultation. Outrageous.
Here’s the paragraph they cut:
Still, there is something a bit stale about the book. There aren’t many new arguments; there is virtually no new data; and often the authors simply cite the work of others without performing their own testing or validation. Although much of the second part argues that hard-to-quantify variables need more rigorous attention from social scientists, the narratives in the final part of the book sometimes feel like just-so stories. We are told, for example, that culture matters, but we are given no real way to test whether and how much that may be so. We are given classic stereotypes about Latin American values, but are given no real way to test whether they were decisive in democracy’s development. Nevertheless, the book will be useful to many readers by introducing them to the world of democracy studies; it helpfully lays out the terrain in the field and makes a contribution with its broad-ranging exploration of democratic development in Latin America. Although the book will not likely be remembered as Lipset’s most original or thought-provoking contribution to social science, it surely displays his many impressive interventions into our understanding of democracy and allows us to see how his approach to studying democracy can be useful for the those interested in Latin America in particular.
Posted by Ethan Leib on April 13, 2005 at 11:04 AM