ABSTRACT
The concept of political culture has been a staple of the literature in comparative politics since the 1960s, yet, as a paradigm for research in Latin America, it remains fresh and alluring. In the 1990s, political culture must be interpreted in a far broader context than did Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba in The Civic Culture, published in the 1960s. The first viewpoint goes back to historical interpretations of the Iberian heritage and to scholarly assumptions like those of Kalman Silvert, Gino Germani, and Kenneth Organski in the 1970s. They assumed that the political culture of Southern Europe were essentially those of Brazil and the nations of the Southern Cone in South America. In the 1980s and the early 1990s, Latin American social scientists uncovered changes in directions that support wider political participation, gradual changes in underlying values that bode well for the consolidation of democracy, at least in some nations.
