Culture Politics and Politics

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POLITICAL CULTURE ANDTHE SCIENCE OE POLITICS

Barry Levitt*Emory University

THE SOUL OF LATIN AMERICA: THE CULTURAL AND POLITICAL TRADI-TION. By Howard J. W iarda. (New H aven: Yale University Press, 2001Pp. 417. $35.00 cloth.)LATIN AMERICA AT THE END OF POLITICS. By For r e s t D. C o l b u r n .(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp152. $35.00 cloth,$14.95 paper.)THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF PALACE WARS: LAWYERS, ECONO-

MISTS, AND THE CONTEST TO TRANSFORM LATIN AMERICAN STATES.By Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth. (Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, 2002. Pp . 352. $50.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.)CITIZEN VIEWS OF DEMOCRACY IN LATIN AMERICA. Edited by Roder icAi Ca m p. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. Pp . 304.$45.00 cloth , 22.95 paper.)

In anoft-quoted line from his 1973 book The Interpretation of Cul-tures, Clifford Geertz wrote, "One of the things that everyone knows,but no one can quite think how to demon strate is that a coun try's poli-tics reflect the design of its culture."' Farther d ow n the pag e, though,Geertz asserts:Above all, what the attempt to link politics and culture needs is a less breathlessview of the former and a less aesthetic view of the latter ... The two being thusreframed, determining the connection between them becomes a practicable en-terprise, though hardly a modest one.^

Taking Geertz's dictum to heart, this review article examines four re-cent wo rks that attempt to make general statements about contempo rarypolitical culture in Latin Am erica. Rather than presen ting an exhaustive


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366 Latin American Research Reviewoverview of Latin American political culture, I illustrate the diversity ofmethodological approaches and ontological starting points that socialscientists use to study political culture. The approaches represented heremight broadly be categorized as intellectual history; interpretive essays;studies of elite culture; and public opinion research. It is this last approachthat tends to be found within m ainstream political sciencewhen issuesof political culture are add ressed at all within the discipline.

Before discussing the books under review, it wou ld be w orthw hile tostep back and briefly examine the last few decades of scholarship on po -litical culture within political science. If, as Mark Lichbach and AlanZuckerman contend, the three main approaches to comparative politicsare rationalist, culturalist, and structuralist, then the culturalist approachis clearly the black sheep of the family. It is the least well represented inthe leading disciplinary journals. Of course, interesting work, particu-larly on Latin Am erican political culture , is being produced in anthropol-ogy and cultural studies. But the leading authors in these fields are notwidely read by political scientists.'* Even when political scientists haveconcentrated their energies on questions of culture, they have tended tofocus on subjective rather than intersubjective approachesthat is, onindividual attitudes and values rather than socially shared identities andmeanings.^ Cultural approaches are dismissed for being vague about theobject of study and the units of analysis; for blurring the line betweenculture and other categories such as behavior and institutions; and forfailing to explain political change. What is more, causal mechanismshow and why a given cultural attribute leads to one poUtical outcomeand not another are often indiscemible.

For these reasons, research programs focused on political culture haveemerged only in fits and starts. Prior to the discipline's "behavioralistrevolution," political science studie s of political culture usually "offered

3. Mark Irving Lichbach and A lan S. Zuckerman, eds.. Comparative Politics: Rationa lity,Culture, Structure (New York: Cam bridge University Press, 1997).4. Important recent works include Nestor Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategiesfor Entering and Leaving Modernity, Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez, trans.(Minneapolis: University of M innesota Press, 1995); Roman de la Camp a, Latin Ameri-canism (Minneapolis: Unive rsity of M innesota P ress, 1999); W alter M ignolo, Local Histo-


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REVIEW ESSAYS 3 6 7a un ique exegesis of political behav ior w ithin a given state," po rtrayedin terms of national character or cu ltural personalities.^ Likewise, m anyof the modernization theorists of the 1960s and 70s emphasizedbuthad trouble proving the cultural "determ inants" of economic devel-opment. In addition, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's 1963 break-through book. The C ivic Cu lture, identified a cluster of attitudes andvalues that they dub bed "civic culture;" certain cultura l traits, they ar-gued, led to stable democracies.''Ronald Inglehart subsequently pioneered cross-national research thatbuilt on, and empirically tested. Almond and Verba's assertions.* In hismodel, the prevalence of a few specific individual attitudes and val-ues overall life satisfaction, in terpersonal trust, and a disdain for revo-lutionary changestrongly increased the likelihood that democracywould persist in any given country. But Edward Muller and MitchellSeligson argued that Inglehart had it backwards: democratic experi-ence causes the develop ment of civic cultureor at the very least, thereis a reciprocal relationship here. These authors successfully tested theiralternate m ode l on a broader dataset, which included m any m ore LatinAm erican cases than In gleh art's.' Similarly, Robert Jackman and RossMiller noted that Inglehart's early work analyzed m ostly advanced in-dustrialized democracies. When Inglehart's data were reanalyzed byJackman and Miller, cultural explanations did not prove significant.'"

This debate continues to unfold. In a recent article, Seligson arguedthat In gleha rt's findings were a classic case of the "ecological fallacy,"or imputing macro-level findings with micro-level significance."

6. Robert W. Jackman an d Ross A. M iller, "A Renaissance of Political Cu lture?" Ameri-can Journal ofPolitieal Science 40, no. 3 (August 1996): 632-59 (633). For examples of thesenational 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 Hav en: Yale University Press, 1962). As recently as 1995,a review essay commented that the study of political culturenotwithstanding a fewexemplary workswas still mired in techniques that could not pass social scientificmu ster. See David D. Latin, "The Civic Cu lture at 30," American Political Science Review89, no . 1 (March 1995): 168-73.7. See, for exam ple, work by D avid McC lelland, Alex Inkeles and D.H. Smith, andon Latin AmericaLawrence Harrison. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic


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368 Latin American Research ReviewControlling for economic deve lopment, the influence of culture largelydisa ppears from the model and looking specifically at data from Cen-tral America, Seligson finds no "civic culture syndrome" at all. '^Inglehart countered by shifting the terms of the debate and presentinga new conceptualization of democracy."Parallel to this deba te over civic culture, political scientists have alsobeen arguing over the concept of "social capital." In Robert Putnam's1993 study of regional governments in Italy, he finds that what bestexplains the performance of democratic institutions is not socioeconomicdevelopment, but rather "civic comm unity": participation in public af-fairs, conditions of political equality, no rm s of trust and solidarity, andabove all the existence of a vibran t civil society." Taken together, P utnamdubs these individual and collective civic attributes "social capital."The concept of social capital garnered a great deal of attention in U.S.policy circles and think-tanks in the 1990s.^^ But notwithstanding thebuzz that it created, this approach, too, has come under fire. WhenJackman and Miller test Putnam 's indicators as separate variables, theyfind no statistically significant relationship between political cultureand the effectiveness of governm ent in stitution s.''' Building on this cri-tique, Frederick Soit finds that broad citizen par ticipation in politics isitself facilitated by more advanced and egalitarian economic develop-ment, not by civic associations.'^

Jan-Erik Lane and Svante Ersson provid e a m ore recent and less con-troversial attem pt to build an em pirically sound theory of political cul-ture.'* These European scholars assess the impact of a wide range ofcultural variablesethnicity, religion, historical legacies, social struc-tures, and individual values and attitudeson political outcomes atthe national, regional and individual level. The authors do find that"culture m atters," bu t it appa rently "m atter s" in different ways acrossdifferent societies.

12. Instead, Seligson finds support for the impact of education and other elements ofthe "conventional socioeconomic status explan ation" for democracy in Central Am erica(287).13. Ronald Inglegart and Christian Welzel, "Political Culture and Democracy: Ana-lyzing Cross-Level Linkages," Comparative Politics 35 (October 2003): 61-79.


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REVIEW ESSAYS 3 6 9So we may be, in a sense, back where we started: studying culturewithin regional and national units of analysis. But area studies in the

social sciencesincluding Latin American studiesincreasingly de-mand empirical rigor and a rethinking of what we thought we knew.(One of Inglehart's co-authored pieces on political culture was point-edly titled "Does Latin America Exist?" Answ er: it do es. )" Phenomenasuch as authoritarian attitudes , mass suppo rt for democracy, or trust ininstitutions are offhandedly cited too frequently by Latin Am ericanistsfor political culture to be left unexam ined . And social scientists are look-ing at Latin American political culture, albeit under very disparatemethodological guises. It is in this light that I examine the four wo rksund er review here.

The Soul ofLatin America, by H ow ard W iarda, traces Iberian and LatinAmerican political thought and political culture from ancient Romethrough to the present day. Wiarda produced this magnum opus afterdecades of scholarship on Latin American politics. This study isgrounded in an argument about the importance of foundational politi-cal philosop hies in shap ing political culture. And unlike other sw eep-ing work s on the "essence" of Latin Am erica such as Carlos Fuentes 'non-fiction The Buried MirrorWiarda is refreshingly up front aboutboth the leverage and the lim itations of such an app roach.He begins by com paring the foundational philosophies and politicalcultures of Latin America and the United Statesand refers back tothis comparison at various junctures throu ghou t the book. Accordingto Wiarda, the founders of the United States were fleeing absolutismand feudalism, while colonists of what became Latin America recre-ated these systems on far flung shores. While early North Americansvalued individual rights and political moderation, their Ibero-Ameri-can counterparts suppo sedly valorized g roup privilegecorporatismand political extremism. And the philosophers who inspired andinnovated Latin Am erican political culture (Augustine, Aqu inas, Suarez,and especially Rousseau) are comparedunfavorably, it sometimesseemswith Locke, Montesquieu and Madison.The key aspects of Iberian and Latin American political culture thatWiarda retum s to throughou t this book include inequality, hierarchy, col-

lectivism, militarism, religious orthodoxy, and mercantilist economics.The author looks forand, with remarkable consistency, findsthese


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370 Latin American Research ReviewLatin Am erican political culture are retrospectively portrayed as leadingin the same direction. Hispania adopted the militarism of Sparta ratherthan the democracy of Athens, and the hierarchy of the Roman empirewithout the republican ideals. The prolonged Christian reconquest ofMoorish Iberia engendered militaristic feudalism, concentration of landand wealth, religious intolerance, and group (rather than individual)rights. This was exacerbated by the Counter-Reformation and the Inqui-sition, which kept liberal ideas from spreading to Spain's colonies.

Wiarda never sees a clear break in this pattern. Spanish Americanindependence was a separation from Spain without a real shift in po-litical thought; early democracy meant enforcing collective rights, notaffirming indiv idual rights. W here liberal political thought gained as-cendancy in nineteenth-century Latin America it was often under theguise of positivismorder and progress, not liberty and equalitywhich W iarda views as elite control with a liberal facade. In Latin Ameri-can nationalism, Wiarda similarly sees implicit values of racism,hierarchy, and exclusivity. Even tw entieth-cen tury shifts in Latin Ameri-can political culturebroader definitions of citizenship, the influenceof Marxism, and the various waves of democratization are view ed asbeing guided and constrained by the influence of Iberian politicalthought.^^ For Wiarda, democracy and economic development in con-temporary Latin America are perpetually hampered by seemingly im-mutab le facets of its political cultu re.

The Soul of Latin America is a comprehensive synopsis of Iberian andLatin American intellectual histo ry as it relates to questions of politics.(And in the classroom , I found this book to be an excellent catalyst fordiscussion.) But the bibliography that Wiarda draw s upo n seems slantedtow ards politically conserva tive w orks from the 1960s and 1970s. Ageneration of scholarship, including both revisionist histories and ac-counts of popula r sector political cultures in different pe riod s, is poorlyrepresented." Furthermore, if cultural heritage is destiny, W iarda w ou ld

21. One modem political philosophy that gamers a great deal of attention from Wiarda, inthis book and in his life's work, is corporatism: a hierarchical relationship between a central-ized state and officially recognized groups within society, organized in top-down fashion.22. For exam ple, W iarda's assertion that Latin America was "born feu dal" an d stayed


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REVIEW ESSAYS

need to account for the drastic late twentieth-century changes in thepolitical cultures of Spain and Portugal, the m other countries. He alsoemploys too many blanket statements about "Latin Am erica" and "LatinAmericans" (as an undifferentiated wh ole), desp ite prom ising to avoidsuch stereotypes and generalizations.^ Finally, this book could havepresented a more explicit causal explanation of how foundational phi-losophies can, in fact, shape societies and political cultures.W here Wiarda sees a great deal of continuity in Latin Am erican politi-cal culture over time, Forrest Colbum perceives a severe disjuncture inthe late twentieth century. In Tjatin America at the End of Politics, Colbumargues that the region has come to the end of one paradigmthe ideo-logical contest between the great "isms" of the twentieth century (liberal-ism, M arxism, nationalism, etc.)^but lacks a well-articxilated replacementfor this paradigm. While Wiarda argues that these ideologies neverstrongly took root in Latin America, Colbum views thecontestation overthese ideologies as a stable feature of Latin American political cultureuntil recently, that is. The apparen t victory of liberal democracy in formalpolitics and neoliberalism in the economic sphere, Colbu m fears, has ren-dered Latin American political systems "unprepared to offer public solu-tions to serious collective problem s" (7).Colburn runs through a range of issues and themes in no particularorder and with little consistency in analytical frames. Two introduc-tory chapters a re followed by brief, often anecdotal chap ters on urban-ization, ideological shifts, democratization, entrepreneurship, theenvironm ent, consumerism, crime, poverty, gend er inequality, U.S. in-fluence, art, and migration. While this approach has produced a bookthat is easily digestible and very accessible to non -experts, it also omitsnoteworthy empirical research findings on the themes with which hegrapples. In the chapter on democratization, for example, he writes:"Surprisingly, there are no socio-economic ind icators, such as per-capitaincome, that predict political outco mes" (35). Yet this has been the sub -ject of multiple research programs, ongoing debates in scholarly are-nas, and dozens (if not hundreds) of books, articles, and

23. One example: "It is not at all clear, in the nineteenth century and later, if LatinAmerica wanted North American-style liberalism and pluralism" (143); see also pp. 25,319, 322, and 357, among others.


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372 Latin American Research ReviewColburn does offer his readers a num ber of very perceptive observa-tions. For example, public opinion in Latin America is increasingly re-

acting and respo ndin g to issues of governance a nd corruption . But theauthor ultimately laments that the absence of a unifying ideologicalframew ork results in piecemeal reforms rather than sw eeping politicalchange. Colburn attributes causal power to political culture, but he doesnot fully explore the ways in which ideologies transform political out-comes. Nor does he adequately su ppo rt his assum ption that big, unify-ing ideas have a salutary effect on political systems. In fact, other scholarshave argued that twentieth century Latin American political culturehad a surfeit of ideologythat the region was a "living museum" ofaccumulated ideologies.^^ Colburn's overarching critique seems to bethat Latin Am erica's historically tu m ultuous political culture has sim-ply becom e less colorful.These new realities of electoral democracy and neoliberalism alsoprovide the backdrop for Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth's study ofehte pol i t ics and pol i t ical ideas . The Internationalization of Palace Wars.This book is a struc tured com parison of four case stud ies (Brazil, Chile,Mexico and Argen tina), contextualized within larger regional and glo-bal transformations. According to the authors, the professions of lawand economics, in both the global North and in Latin America, havealtered the cultures and practices of Latin Am erican politics. Their mainargum ent is that late twen tieth-century changes in the roles of law andlawyersan economistic approach to law, as well as a new emphasison human rightshave engendered "palace wars" within both theUnited States and Latin Am erican states. They also assert a connectionbetween the emergence of neoliberalism and the rise of human rights

discourses.^*" Local and na tion al actors in Latin America use these shift-ing transnational resources (material and ideological) to build and con-solidate power at home.In all four countries, there wa s a decline in the pow er of "gentlem anlawyers" with elite family ties to the state, and a rise in the power ofeconomists (and some lawyers and social scientists) trained and legiti-mized by US and international institutions. Yet there remain importantdifferences in legal and political cultures among the four cases, based

not only in longer-term historical patterns but on divergent experienceswith authoritarianism and democratization as well . Chile under


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REVIEW ESSAYS 3 7 3first for m onetarist econom ists, then for exporters of hum an rights anddemocracy. By contrast, Brazil's palace w ars w ere m ore internally ori-ented; bar associations played a prominent role in opposing the 1964-85 mihtary regime, and thus local and national elite networks of law yerswere able to make a comeback after dem ocratization. Argentina exhib-ited a milder version of this same trend. In Mexico, the Revolution hadpu shed the "gentleman law yers" out of the state and into the privatesector, bu t neoliberal reforms and the rise of firms speciahzing in inter-national business law are allowing these elite netw orks to recoup theirinfluence.

In fact, across Latin America, national elites with "cosm opolitan" skillsare increasingly valued as intemational interlocutors and power bro-kers. Business lawyers have gotten involved in electoral reform and an-ticorruption efforts, and the World Bank is sponsoring the study ofgovernance in Latin Americam ore evidence of the synergies betweenneoliberahsm and discourses of hum an rights an d the rule of law. ^ Butthis power to export legal and pohtical culture is not absolute; for ex-am ple, intemationa l efforts at promoting judicial reform and the rule oflaw in Latin America are "bound to be a limited success at best" (250).The Internationalization of Palace Wars i s a h igh ly orig inal and detai ledwork, but is imfortimately ham pered by disorganization and method -ological fuzziness. Sections are roughly in chronological o rder, bu t chap-ters leap from theme to theme and from North to South, with onlytenuous links among them. More seriously, the conclusions that theauth ors d raw abou t people and organizations often have an air of con-spiracy theory. Lists of nam es and chrono logies of events are presen tedas if they were evidence of causal processes. Adm ittedly, it is extremelydifficult to do the kind of analysis that the authors have undertaken.But there are mod els upon which they could have d raw n, such as the"ideas-in-politics" literature in political science and network analysisin sociology. Nonetheless, this book embeds a wealth of detail abouttwen tieth-century transformations in Latin Am erica w ithin a fresh ap -proach to larger global processes of change.

Unlike Dezalay and Garth, the contributors to Citizen Views of De-mocracy in Latin America stud y pohtical culture from the grou nd up , byanalyzing ind ividua l level attitudes, values and beliefs about w hat poli-


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374 Latin American Research Reviewworked with data from surveys administered in Mexico, Costa Ricaand Chile. ^ Overall, their findings suggest bo th uniq uely nationa l dif-ferences in citizens' definitions and expectations of democracy, as wellas the salience of individual factors that transcend national boundaries.Citizens' ideas about democracy and the state do vary by country.Roderic Cam p notes that Costa Ricans, likeUS citizens, tend to identifydemocracy with liberty or freedom, while Chileans and Mexicans ad-ditionally associate democracy with equality and "prog ress." Further-more, Mitchell Seligson finds that nationality has by far the strongestimpact on individual preferences for democracy over other systems, andthat demographic variables (race, class, gender, etc.) have little or noimpact on these preferences. Miguel Basafiez and Pablo Paras arguethat race and ethnicity do, in fact, matter but their impact is difficultto measure because their meaning and social structures vary widelyfrom country to country. Perhaps most strongly, Timothy Power andMary Clark conclude that, while "civic culture" values matter morethan demographic traits, national context far outweighs the causalpower of individual-leve l va riables. As they pu t it, "political socializa-tion is from the top do w n and from the past to the present, whe ther itoccurs with in the family or via the sta te" (68).

In a separate chapter, Mary Clark confirms long-standing beliefsabout the depth and breadth of democratic culture in Costa Rica. Butcuriously, she finds a relatively low level of overall satisfaction withdemocracywith whiter, wealthier, and urban respondents even lesssatisfied than poorer, rural Costa Ricans or those in ethnic/racial mi-norities. Examining political culture in Mexicoand com paring it withtheir neighbor to the northFrederick Turner and Carlos Elordi findthat Mexicans express stronger s uppo rt for autho ritarianism than U.S.citizens, and conceptualize democracy differently than iheir gringo coun-terparts do. The data further suggest that historical and institutionallegacies filter individual-level attitudes and values, such that they donot translate into political outcomes the same way in different coun-tries. Chapters by Joseph Klesner and Louis Goodman reach similaroverall conclusions. In Chile, a history of political polariza tion followedby the traum atic experience of the Pinochet regime has created an elec-torate divided not only in their support for democracy, but in theirconceptua lization of it as well. In Mexico, Klesner finds that decades of


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