“This book sets the new scholarly standard for the analysis of the recruitment and selection of candidates for Congress and President in the major Latin American countries. The editors formulate a general framework to study the role of political parties in candidate selection. The authors apply it to the country studies for the legislature and the executive. The book is theoretically coherent, making it possible for the empirical case studies to generate genuinely comparable results. The result is a gem of rigorous scholarship that sheds light on understudied key questions for constitutional democratic politics. Its scholarship is excellent.” —Jorge I. Domínguez, Harvard University “Employing a common typology and framework, this outstanding collection provides the first sustained examination of issues of political recruitment and candidate selection for major legislative and executive posts in contemporary Latin America.” —Jonathan Hartlyn, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “A heavily documented and scholarly sophisticated text, it will find its main audience with comparative politics scholars and advanced graduate students in the area of Latin American politics.” —J.A. Rhodes Choice “Pathways to Power represents an enormous undertaking by an illustrious team of scholars, and the rewards of this effort are substantial. The book opens a research agenda that previous studies have often acknowledged but less often pursued, because of the empirical demands of doing thorough comparative work on candidate selection. Siavelis and Morgenstern harness the resources, both conceptual and in the form of raw labor, to advance this agenda. The book is a major achievement, and those of us with an interest in political institutions and democracy in Latin America are the beneficiaries.” —John M. Carey Latin American Politics and Society