This essay reviews six recent books that explore how revolutionary upheavals pushed imperial and republican projects alike to experiment with novel political ideas and mechanisms. These initiatives came in response to calls for representation and equality throughout the Age of Revolution. In doing so, these books reveal the failures and successes of these projects in responding to these demands. The authors of these works show that republican and imperial processes of state-building and legitimacy-building did not have a predetermined outcome—quite the opposite. To constitute themselves as valid political alternatives, revolutionary, imperial, and republican projects had to adapt to different actors’ expectations, contingencies, and growing geopolitical tensions. By exposing those adaptation processes, the six books under review demonstrate that the Age of Revolution was a period of intense political experimentation across the ideological spectrum.

Following the ends to the civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, the revolutionary coalitions that had led the fight against authoritarian regimes began to fracture. However, none of the splinter parties that broke from the Sandinista National Liberation Front, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, and Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit has succeeded on their own as political parties. In this article, I argue that there is no single reason to explain the poor performances of the Democratic Party (PD), the Renovating Movement (MR), and the Democratic Front Party (FDR) in El Salvador, the Sandinista Renovation Movement (Renovate-MRS) and the Movement to Rescue Sandinismo (Rescue-MRS) in Nicaragua, and the New Nation Alliance (ANN) in Guatemala. However, their limited financial resources, alliances with non-revolutionary centrist and centre-right parties, and voter tendency to overlook internal ideological and personal debates within the original political parties, especially the FSLN and FMLN, have not helped.