This volume brings together some of the most perceptive social scientists doing empirical work on Dominican politics. They assess the challenges and successes in democratisation, mostly focusing on the period the Dominican Liberal Party (PLD) held the presidency.

Continuity in Dominican politics is of another order. Joaquín Balaguer, the puppet president when dictator Rafael Trujillo was assassinated in 1961, was president from 1966 until 1978, and then again from 1986 to1996. He was ineligible to run in 1996, but run he did in 2000, narrowly missing out in the second round of that vote. Danilo Medina (PLD) lost in the second round against Hipólito Mejia of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD). Balaguer died two years later.

Balaguer outlived arch-rivals Juan Bosch and José Francisco Peña Gómez. Bosch, who founded the PRD and the PLD, was elected president in late 1962 (PRD), but a coup removed him from office after seven months, setting off a civil war and a US intervention. Bosch ran for the presidency for the PLD in 1978, 1982, 1986, 1990, and 1994, after which he retired. He returned to support his party’s candidate, Leonel Fernández, against his former colleague Peña Gómez in 1996 as part of an agreement with Balaguer. Peña Gómez, a long-time leader of the PRD, mayor of Santo Domingo (1982-1986), and presidential candidate in 1990, 1994, and 1996, passed away in 1998 while running for the mayoralty of Santo Domingo.

Fernández was president from 1996 to 2000 and 2004 to 2012. Medina, his former vice president (2004-2012) and then the country’s president (2012-2020), contemplated reform to allow a third consecutive term before throwing his weight against Fernández’s candidacy in the PLD, leading to Fernández forming the People’s Force (FP) and running as its candidate in 2020. Margarita Cedeño de Fernández, then wife of Leonel, had run for the PLD presidency but served as Medina’s vice president for eight years. The 2020 elections were won by Luis Abinader of the Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM), a party formed by Mejia when his return to presidential candidacy was blocked in the PRD. Ramfis Domínguez-Trujillo, the grandson of Rafael Trujillo, declared himself a candidate for the 2020 presidency for two parties before running as an independent, though the Central Electoral Board (JCE) rejected his candidacy because of his dual nationality (he is also a US citizen).

Editors Jacqueline Jiménez Polanco and Ernesto Sagás and their colleagues address this continuismo (the idea of continuity), as well as the continuity and development of new forms of exclusion of political minorities and the ongoing corruption facilitated by continuismo – heightened by PLD dominance between 2004 and 2020. Jiménez Polanco, an expert who has characterised the Dominican political party system as a “cartel” system, offers a comprehensive introduction to Dominican politics. The political system regularly holds elections, the fairness of which are qualitatively different from those prior to 1996, and the country faces little head-on threat to the operation of democracy. Yet, as democracy has been consolidated, corruption has increased considerably, notably under the remit of a reformist political party. Institutionalisation of democratic processes that are inclusive and reduce incumbent advantages remain wanting. Similarly, despite considerable economic growth, minimal reductions in economic inequality have occurred.

Carlos Morel and Anselmo Muñiz point the reader’s attention away from formal democracy, positing that democracy should be evaluated in terms of its ability to solve the problems of the demos. On this account, Morel and Muñiz find Dominican democracy lacking. They tie the stability of the political system to the hegemony of political elites, and they note that the democracy has passed laws that have reduced rights for racial and ethnic minorities, women, and sexual minorities. Such exclusionary practices are both new and traditional. Most specifically, images of Haiti as a threatening, underdeveloped, and immoral “other” have both contributed to and resulted from social norms of exclusion for low-wage migrant workers. Prejudice against Haitians is connected to racial identity, and this impacts darker-skinned Dominicans, whether they have Haitian ancestry or not.

A number of chapters in the book address the irony of new mechanisms of expressing prejudice against Haitian-Dominicans alongside the ample extension of political rights (e.g., voting, dual nationality) to Dominicans living outside of the Dominican Republic. In a broad critical analysis of Dominican democracy, Sagás brilliantly outlines the legacy and dangers of continuismo before giving careful analysis to a controversial 2013 Constitutional Court ruling. The Dominican constitution recognises jus soli — that is, anyone born in the country except for those “in transit” are Dominican citizens. The court ruled that children of Haitians working in the country were children of people who were “in transit,” and, thus, not Dominican citizens. The ruling, a sharp break with the status quo, may have denationalised up to 200,000 people and was immediately subject to widespread domestic and international condemnation.

Access to birth certificates was spotty outside of urban areas for poor workers, so the ruling opened up considerable anxiety, while exposing the Medina government to withering criticism. Eve Hayes de Kalaf shows how the establishment of a new identity card (cédula) at this time was a moment to re-define Dominican identity. The new ID card was created, among other things, to help with registering people with redistributive programs. The opportunity to, essentially, re-register the nation demonstrated underlying political trends: the cédula was easily available to Dominicans in the diaspora whose registration for elections increased substantially, while the process was more exclusive for Haitian-Dominicans.

Kalaf and Sagás demonstrate the challenges of a political system that was innovative in integrating diaspora communities into domestic politics while, at the same time, reducing rights — in other words, denationalising citizens at home. Sagás shows how, with uneven efforts and without building institutionalised mechanisms, the Dominican Republic incorporated the diaspora not only in presidential elections but also through created “districts” overseas, which elected officials to seats in the lower legislative chamber. Dominicans voting in New York told Sagás, “We want to be counted too.” As the authors in the book note, so do so many groups who live in the country.

As Jiménez Polanco and Benito Sánchez in the chapters on corruption note, citizens now demand that they not only count, but they can also hold governments to account for their (in)action. The book closes with cautious optimism about anti-corruption campaigns launched by President Abinader, who has allowed for Milagros Ortiz Bosch (Juan Bosch’s niece), director general of ethics and government integrity, and Miriam Germán Brito, attorney general, to conduct a high-profile anti-corruption campaign. Will these campaigns, which gained much of their evidence from the global Odebrecht corruption investigations, provide opportunities for enabling meaningful, independent investigative institutions that can hold elected officials accountable? Or will they provide for score-settling and the dismantling of the one-party-cartel’s control over the state in favour of a new group hungry for spoil? The authors are hopeful, though there are many reasons to see the 2020 elections as being similar to those of 1996. Whatever the case, democratic elections and government are more assured than ever, while the population expresses cyclical frustration with problems new and old. There is much continuity in change, and this book offers an excellent panoramic analysis of contemporary Dominican politics.

This is a review of Jacqueline Jiménez Polanco and Ernesto Sagás (eds) Dominican Politics in the Twenty First Century: Continuity and Change. (London: Routledge, 2023)

Anthony Spanakos is Professor in the Department of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. He is co-editor of Conceptualising Comparative Politics book series at Routledge.

This review article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.