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Attitudes Toward the Public Interest and Conflict in Latin American Political Culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2022
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Latin Americanists commonly stress the traditional cultural and philosophical differences between the region they study and the United States. A frequent contention holds that such historical contrasts persist to the present. For example, Howard J. Wiarda asserts, “Latin America … remains paternalistic, hierarchical, authoritarian, Catholic, corporate, personalist, and elitist to its core.” In contrast, the United States is presumably more egalitarian, Protestant, and impersonal than her southern-hemispheric neighbors.
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- Research Reports and Notes
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- Copyright © 1976 by the University of Texas Press
References
Notes
1. Howard J. Wiarda, “Social Change, Political Development, and the Latin American Tradition,” in Howard J. Wiarda, ed., Politics andSocial Changein LatinAmerica: The Distinct Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974), p. 18. Similar arguments are made in other selections in this book.
2. Glen Dealy, "The Tradition of Monistic Democracy in Latin America,” in Wiarda, ed., Politics and Social Change, p. 77.
3. Ibid., p. 79.
4. Kalman H. Silvert, Man's Power (New York: The Viking Press, 1970), p. 134.
5. Corporatism is essentially the organization of society around occupationally defined “pillars of society” such as business, labor, the church, and the military-each component institution being stratified internally by social class. See Silvert, Man's Power, pp. 136-38 and Howard J. Wiarda, “Toward a Framework for the Study of Political Change in the Iberic-Latin Tradition: The Corporative Model,” World Politics 25 (january 1973): 206-35.
6. Silvert, Man's Power, p. 138. Cf. Banfield's typology of “unitary” vs. “individualistic” conceptions of the public interest in Martin Meyerson and Edward C. Banfield, Politics, Planning, and the PublicInterest (New York: The Free Press, 1955), pp. 322-29. Most of the North American political science literature on the public interest consists of arguments about the utility of the concept and also analyses by scholars of other scholars' use of the concept. For a recent critique of the literature, see Clarke E. Cochran, “Political Science and 'The Public Interest',” Journal of Politics 36 (May 1974): 327-55. Three of the more notable contributions on the topic are Richard E. Flathman, The Public Interest (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1966); Carl J. Friedrich, ed., Nomos V: The Public Interest (New York: Atherton Press, 1962); and Glendon A. Schubert, Jr., The PublicInterest (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1960).
7. For example, Dealy, “Monistic Democracy,” pp. 73-76, as well as other selections in the Wiarda volume.
8. The advice of our colleague Jose Antonio Gil helped us considerably in drawing up the questionnaire. A description of the larger research project can be found in Eric P. Veblen, “Technical and Political Policy Orientations: Some Preliminary Notes” (Caracas: unpublished paper, 1975).
9. The possible values of Q range from -1 (perfect negative association) to +1 (perfect positive association). Values near zero indicate a very weak relationship. The contingency tables are set up in such a way that if the predicted (hypothesized) relationship exists, Q will have a positive value. Yule's Q (also referred to as Kendall's Q) is a particularly appropriate measure of the strength of interrelationships among a set of items hypothesized to relate to a single, underlying attitudinal dimension. On Yule's Q, see Lee F. Anderson, Meredith W. Watts, Jr., and Allen R. Wilcox, Legislative Roll-Call Analysis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), pp. 50-51 and 102-3; Oliver Benson, Political Science Laboratory (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1969), pp. 151-52 and 241-45; and Hubert M. Blalock, Jr., Social Statistics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), pp. 231-32. 179
10. This overall weakness of item 6 is probably explainable by its wording: The item taps attitudes toward the national plan and does not refer directly to the public interest or general interests of the society.
11. We think that significance testing is inappropriate for our data, since our respondent groups are not samples drawn randomly from well-defined populations.
12. As explained in note 9, a negative sign indicates that the association runs in the direction opposite that of the predicted relationship. In this case, a negative value means that higher Public Interest Scores tend to go together with less opposition to conflict.
13. While not forming a random sample of the Venezuelan population, the CENDES Conflict and Consensus surveys do represent a variety of social-class and occupational groups. Unfortunately, however, none of that project's questions are comparable with our public interest and conflict items. See Centro de Estudios del Desarrollo, Estudio de conflictos y consenso: Serie de resultados parciales (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1967).
14. See Daniel H. Levine, Conflict and Political Change in Venezuela (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), and Juan Carlos Rey, “El sistema de partidos en Venezuela,” Politeia 1 (1972): 175-230.
15. A case in point is the controversial oil nationalization bill, which was being considered by the Congress as this research note was being written. Despite a majority in the Congress and strong party discipline, Acción Democrática made extensive efforts to obtain a law that represented a consensus. The position of AD leaders seemed to be that a law passed on the basis of its majority alone would be taken as mere partisan imposition.
16. Levine, Conflict and Political Change, especially chap. 9. See also Daniel H. Levine, “Issues in the Study of Culture and Politics: A View from Latin America,” Publius 4 (Spring 1974): 77-104.
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