The Legitimacy Puzzle in Latin America

John A. Booth is Regents Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas. In addition to his four coedited volumes and fourteen articles and chapters with this study's coauthor, Mitchell A. Seligson, he is the author of Understanding Central America: Global Forces, Rebellion, and Change (fourth edition 2006 coauthored with Christine J. Wade and Thomas W. Walker); Costa Rica: Quest for Democracy (1998); and The End and the Beginning: The Nicaraguan Revolution (second edition 1985). He has published articles in a wide array of scholarly journals in the United States and Latin America, is an associate editor of International Studies Quarterly, and serves on the editorial board of Latin American Politics and Society. Mitchell A. Seligson is the Centennial Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University and a Fellow of the Center for the Americas and of the Vanderbilt Center for Nashville Studies. He founded and directs the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), which conducts the Americas Barometer surveys that currently cover twenty-two countries in the Americas. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and been awarded grants from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and others and has published more than 140 articles, fourteen books, and dozens of monographs. His most recent book is Development and Underdevelopment: The Politics of Global Inequality (fourth edition, 2003, with John Passé Smith).

'The Legitimacy Puzzle examines the fundamental question of the popular legitimacy of democratic governments in Latin America - and what shapes these attitudes. Using a rich new wave of cross-national surveys, Booth and Seligson make a major contribution to understanding the political cultures of Latin American nations in both theoretical and empirical terms. It will become a landmark for understanding the political attitudes of Latin American publics, and the consequences of legitimacy attitudes on political behavior.' Russell J. Dalton, University of California, Irvine

• 1. The legitimacy puzzles; 2. The structure of legitimacy; 3. Countries in the study; 4. The sources of political legitimacy; 5. Legitimacy and political participation; 6. Legitimacy and negative political capital; 7. Legitimacy and democratic values; 8. The sky is not falling: the puzzle solved.