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Political Culture and the Science of Politics
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THE SOUL OF LATIN AMERICA: THE CULTURAL AND POLITICAL TRADITION. By WiardaHoward J. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Pp. 417. $35.00 cloth.)
LATIN AMERICA AT THE END OF POLITICS. By ColburnForrest D. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp 152. $35.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.)
THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF PALACE WARS: LAWYERS, ECONOMISTS, AND THE CONTEST TO TRANSFORM LATIN AMERICAN STATES. By DezalayYves and GarthBryant G. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. 352. $50.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2022
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- Copyright © 2005 by the University of Texas Press
Footnotes
*
The author would like to thank Bianca Premo and Kirk Bowman for their helpful feedback on this essay.
References
1. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 311.
2. Ibid., 311–312.
3. Mark Irving Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman, eds., Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, Structure (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
4. Important recent works include Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Román de la Campa, Latin Americanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). One anthropological work on Latin America that was read somewhat widely by political scientists over the past decade is Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
5. See Marc Howard Ross, “Culture and Identity in Comparative Political Analysis,” in Mark Irving Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman, eds., Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, Structure (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
6. Robert W. Jackman and Ross A. Miller, “A Renaissance of Political Culture?” American Journal of Political Science 40, no. 3 (August 1996): 632–59 (633). For examples of these national culture studies, see Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York: Free Press, 1958); Lucian W. Pye, Politics, Personality, and Nation Building: Burma's Search for Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962). As recently as 1995, a review essay commented that the study of political culture—notwithstanding a few exemplary works—was still mired in techniques that could not pass social scientific muster. See David D. Latin, “The Civic Culture at 30,” American Political Science Review 89, no. 1 (March 1995): 168–73.
7. See, for example, work by David McClelland, Alex Inkeles and D.H. Smith, and— on Latin America—Lawrence Harrison. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).
8. Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990).
9. Edward N. Muller and Mitchell A. Seligson, “Civic Culture and Democracy: The Question of Causal Relationships,” American Political Science Review 88, no. 3 (September 1994): 635–54.
10. Jackman and Miller, op. cit.
11. Mitchell A. Seligson, “The Renaissance of Political Culture or the Renaissance of the Ecological Fallacy?” Comparative Politics 34 (April 2002): 273–92.
12. Instead, Seligson finds support for the impact of education and other elements of the “conventional socioeconomic status explanation” for democracy in Central America (287).
13. Ronald Inglegart and Christian Welzel, “Political Culture and Democracy: Analyzing Cross-Level Linkages,” Comparative Politics 35 (October 2003): 61–79.
14. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
15. It was also taken up by several widely-read authors; see Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1995).
16. Jackman and Miller, op. cit.
17. Frederick Solt, “Civics or Structure? Revisiting the Origins of Democratic Quality in the Italian Regions,” British journal of Political Science 34, no. 1 (2004): 123–35.
18. Jan-Erik Lane and Svante Ersson, Culture and Politics: A Comparative Approach (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2002).
19. Ronald Inglehart and Marita Caballo, “Does Latin America Exist? (And is There a Confucian Culture?): A Global Analysis of Cross-Cultural Differences,” PS: Political Science and Politics 30, no. 1 (March 1997): 34–47.
20. In my own experience using this text in the classroom, US college students find the comparative element helpful in understanding Latin American political thought.
21. One modern political philosophy that garners a great deal of attention from Wiarda, in this book and in his life's work, is corporatism: a hierarchical relationship between a centralized state and officially recognized groups within society, organized in top-down fashion.
22. For example, Wiarda's assertion that Latin America was “born feudal” and stayed feudal has been a topic of vociferous debate among historians and historical sociologists such as Ernesto Laclau, Steve Stern, Immanuel Wallerstein, and others. Furthermore, Wiarda self-consciously chooses to focus on elite culture. Yet recent scholarship indicates that, throughout history, non-elite Ibero-Americans had their own political cultures too, distinct from—though always tied into—the power centers of church, crown and landowner. Consideration of historical arguments offered by Sarah Chambers, Sergio Serúlnikov, Steve Stern, Sinclair Thompson, Eric Van Young, and Charles Walker—and these are exemplars of just the English-language authors writing in this vein—might have broadened Wiarda's perspective.
23. One example: “It is not at all clear, in the nineteenth century and later, if Latin America wanted North American-style liberalism and pluralism” (143); see also pp. 25, 319, 322, and 357, among others.
24. See Adam Przeworski et. al., Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950- 1990 (Cambridge University Press: New York, 2000); Robert Barro, “Determinants of Democracy,” The Journal of Political Economy 107 (1999):158-83; Mark J. Gasiorowski, “Economic Crisis and Political Regime Change: An Event History Analysis,” The American Political Science Review 89 (1995): 882–97; Ross E. Burkhart and Michael S. Lewis-Beck, “Comparative Democracy: The Economic Development Thesis,” American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 903–10; Kenneth Bollen and Robert Jackman, “The Economic and Noneconomic Determinants of Political Democracy in the 1960s,” Research in Political Sociology 1 (1985): 27–48; and many others.
25. Charles Anderson, Politics and Economic Change in Latin America: The Governing of Restless Nations (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1967).
26. These trends may now be intertwined, but it seems to me that human rights were already being internationalized when Keynesianism was still hegemonic in the North and statist economic policies were more common in Latin America.
27. The authors examine the role of NGOs and think tanks as well.
28. Surveys by MORI international, July 1998. Other current cross-national survey research projects being conducted in Latin America include the World Values Survey and the Latinobarometer.
29. In defense of survey research, I would argue that these are empirical, rather than theoretical questions, and might be resolved by reanalyzing the existing data.
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