Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky (eds.), Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. viii+351, £43.50, 16.50 pb

Most probably, high slave depletion and high rum export volumes had a common cause: heavy sugar crops and the toll that they took on the labour force. Far from constituting some kind of analytical strait-jacket, this typology is successful in disciplining the subsequent wide-ranging discussions of the inuence of informal rules on executive-legislative relations, electoral politics, party politics and the judiciary broadly writ. The collection itself encompasses a diverse array of substantive inquiries into the operation and impact of informal institutions, including studies of the Mexican presidential dedazo, clientelism in Brazil and Honduras, legislative ghost coalitions in Ecuador, norms of executive-legislative power-sharing in Chile, the expectations of electoral insurance among Concertacin candidates in Chile, illicit campaign nance in Brazil, norms of electoral accountability in Argentina, indigenous law in the Andes, norms underlying police violence in Brazilian cities, and mechanisms of electoral dispute resolution concertacesiones in Mexico.