Political Culture and Institutional Development in Costa Rica and Nicaragua: World Making in the Tropics

Extract

Political Culture and Institutional Development in Costa Rica and Nicaragua: World Making in the Tropics. By Consuelo Cruz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 302p. $80.00.

Political culture has remained an attractive subject since works such as Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (1963) propelled it to the fore of comparative politics in the 1960s. Over the last four decades, different approaches to political culture sought to provide theoretical leverage on an array of political phenomena, including political participation, modernization, democratic development, and state building. The appeal of the concept of political culture lies primarily in its intuitive logic: Individuals, organized into groups, are responsible for the creation of political realities. While these realities may certainly be influenced by an array of exogenous factors, their creation is dependent on individuals' perceptions and preferences. Critics of political culture research suggest that attributions of political culture are frequently deterministic or difficult to falsify scientifically. In Political Culture and Institutional Development in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Consuelo Cruz analyzes political culture employing what she refers to as an integrative approach, a rational-structural culturalism that recognizes the direct influence of morally driven, rational political actors on institutional norms.