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Inclusion without Representation in Latin America: Gender Quotas and Ethnic Reservations. By Htun Mala . New York, NY : Cambridge University Press , 2016. 226p. $99.99 cloth, $29.99 paper.
Critical Dialogues
Around the time that Arend Lijphart wrote Democracy in Plural Societies (1977), on electoral engineering and institutional design to accommodate profoundly felt cultural differences in democratic states, Crawford Young wrote The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (1976), arguing that ethnic groups are fluid and contextual. Whereas Lijphart and his intellectual descendants took "groups" for granted and focused attention on designing institutions around them, theorists of ethnic identity showed that ethnicity itself is often a product, rather than a precondition, of politics.
Over the next forty years, political scientists would go on to design not only increasingly sophisticated institutions and electoral mechanisms, but also constitutions to accommodate ethnic difference, as if those differences were not only over-determining, but permanent. And theorists of identity would go on to demonstrate that ethnic, racial, gender, and class differences often intersect to complicate both identities and interests.
Mala Htun's book finally brings these two literatures together in a way that does justice to both. The institutions she looks at, quotas and reservations, are designed to ensure that members of historically excluded groups are elected to political office. Often, although not always, as she shows, they succeed. In Latin America, women and indigenous people in particular are now routinely elected to offices at all levels of government. But does that mean that the interests of "women" and "indigenous people" are represented and advanced in politics? No, or perhaps, not necessarily, is Htun's answer. And part of the reason is that "women," "indigenous people," and also "Afrodescendants" are quite often not actually groups at all. Divided by region, class, ideology, and history, people who identify as women, indigenous, or black often do not also have a distinct set of political interests in common. That's one reason, and I would argue the most important reason, that political inclusion does not translate easily into political representation.
Htun makes this argument in two different ways. The first few chapters of...