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Mixed-member systems have been characterized as encouraging politicians to balance the activities that enhance their personal reputations and those of their parties. Another literature challenges that legislators from one tier are not likely to behave differently from those of the other. After summarizing this debate, data from Venezuela are used to look for evidence supporting either side in a series of behaviors that span the entire legislative process—from bill initiation to committee consideration to final vote. The author concludes that the "best of both worlds" versus "contamination" debate has led to a focus on mixed-member institutions, to the exclusion of other incentive structures confronting legislators and that we need to engage in more careful theorizing about when and where they should expect the electoral tier to have an impact on legislator behavior.

Merillee Grindle addresses three questions: Why would rational politicians choose to give up power? What accounts for the selection of some institutions rather than others? What are the political consequences of the creation of new institutions? She studies cases of decentralizing political reforms in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Argentina. Her case studies are loosely guided by eleven hypotheses deduced from three schools of thought. The schools to which she refers in an introductory and concluding chapter are rational choice, comparative institutionalism, and new institutionalism (the latter has two subvariants: transaction costs and institutional design). The theoretical perspectives are apparently not equally useful across questions, as new institutionalism is not used to deduce hypotheses on why politicians would choose to reform, and rational choice is not applied to the reasons some some institutional changes are chosen over others.

The relationship between capitalism and democracy has been a focal question in political science for years. Compelling arguments have been advanced on all sides of the debate. Democracy promotes capitalism. Capitalism promotes democracy. The two are correlated but are caused by other variables, including everything from a given country's political culture to its position in the world economy. Now the recent turn toward neoliberal economic strategies in Latin America has revitalized the question of whether any one form of capitalism is more compatible with democracy than others.