ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to analyze the connection between micro-level attitudes and regime stability in Latin America. The connection between political culture and democracy has been a concern of social scientists since Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s 1963 breakthrough book, The Civic Culture, identified a cluster of attitudes and values that, they argued, led to stable democracies (Almond and Verba 1963). Ronald Inglehart subsequently pioneered cross-national research that built on, and empirically tested, Almond and Verba’s assertions. In his model, the prevalence of a few specific individual attitudes and values-overall life satisfaction, interpersonal trust, and a disdain for revolutionary changestrongly increased the likelihood that democracy would persist in any given country (Inglehart 1990). Other scholars such as Edward Muller and Mitchell Seligson argued that Inglehart had it backwards: democratic experience causes the development of civic culture-or, at the very least, there is a reciprocal relationship (Muller and Seligson 1994). Parallel to this debate over civic culture, political scientists have also been arguing over the concept of “social capital.” In Robert Putnam’s 1993 study of regional governments in Italy, he finds that what best explains the performance of democratic institutions is not socioeconomic development but rather “civic community”: participation in public affairs, conditions of political equality, norms of trust and solidarity, and above all the existence of a vibrant civil society. Taken together, Putnam dubs these individual and collective civic attributes “social capital” (Putnam 1993). For some scholars, however, Latin America lacks the requisite pattern of beliefs to sustain democratic governance (Wiarda 2001).
