ABSTRACT
Political culture represents a composite view of a country's own societal beliefs and operating norms as found in or based upon its dominant religion, historical experiences, values and ideology, and standard behavior. Political culture can be analyzed and described by examining a country's literature, beliefs, folklore, philosophical assumptions, and behavior. Latin American elitism also stems from the Spanish/Portuguese tradition of nobility, from the feudal landholding system, from racism and from a long history of Iberian and Latin American political theory that justified elite rule. Authoritarianism in Latin America stems from many of the same sources as elitism. Immediately after the overthrow of authoritarianism in the late 1970s and 1980s, support for democracy was extremely high throughout Latin America. These features of historic Latin American political culture—elitism, authoritarianism, hierarchy, organicism and corporatism, and patrimonialism—remained largely intact for most of the three centuries of Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule.
