Political Culture and Institutional Development in Costa Rica and Nicaragua

Abstract

Democracy's checkered past and uncertain future in the developing world still puzzles and fascinates. In Latin America, attempts to construct resilient democracies have been as pervasive as reversals have been cruel. This book is based on a wealth of original historical documents and contemporary interviews with prominent political actors and analyses five centuries of political history in these paradigmatic cases of outstanding democratic success and abysmal failure. It shows that while factors highlighted by standard explanations matter, it is political culture that configures economic development, institutional choices and political pacts in ways that directly affect both democracy's chances and its quality. But it also claims that political culture is a dynamic combination of rational and normative imperatives that define actors' views of the permissible, shape their sense of realism, structure political struggles and legitimate the resulting distribution of power.

Ideational Theorizing in the Social Sciences since “PolicyParadigms,SocialLearning, and theState”

“…As Hall and Taylor noted in “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,” sprinkled throughout historical institutionalist scholarship is a variety of (sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit) understandings of how institutions influence policymaking and political outcomes. For example, historical institutionalists argued that institutions matter by: affecting actors' calculations about the future outcomes of different courses of action and other actors' responses to them, influencing which lessons actors turn to in times of uncertainty and how they filter information, providing moral or cognitive templates for action, and shaping actors' identities and preferences (Abdelal, Blyth, and Parsons ; Béland and Cox ; Cruz ; Hall and Taylor , 939; March and Olsen ).…”

“…What is important to note here is not only the close connection between ideational variables and institutions, that is, that the former can play a critical role in shaping the formation of the latter, but also that it is only by becoming institutionalized that ideas gain the ability to influence political life in an independent fashion. Once institutionalized, ideas can affect the thinking process and behavior of actors by reshaping their identities, goals, understandings of the world, and the incentives and disincentives they face (Abdelal, Blyth, and Parsons ; Cruz ; Finnemore ; Katzenstein ). This brings us to another set of questions facing ideational scholars––namely, those regarding motivation and causality.…”

“…Those definitions I found where either impossibly vague or were really some version of one of the other ideational variables defined earlier. However, see Schmidt () and Cruz ().…”

Human rights and democracy

“…Historical analyses of Spain, Germany, Austria, Costa Rica and Nicaragua show remarkably different national experiences with confronting the past. In some cases (Spain), a policy of selective amnesia has prevailed, in others (Germany) direct and 'top-down' confrontation with the past has been fruitful in promoting reconciliation, while in others (Austria) absence of confrontation with the past means that authoritarian tendencies can haunt the present (see Aguilar 1996;Sa'adah 1998;Cruz 2005;Art 2005as discussed in Cesarini 2009. Such variation in outcome and impact of transitional justice processes is not surprising given the many different experiences with atrocity that countries have had and the many paths that they have pursued in dealing with the past.…”

Human Rights and Democracy

“…Historical analyses of Spain, Germany, Austria, Costa Rica and Nicaragua show remarkably different national experiences with confronting the past. In some cases (Spain), a policy of selective amnesia has prevailed, in others (Germany) direct and 'top-down' confrontation with the past has been fruitful in promoting reconciliation, while in others (Austria) absence of confrontation with the past means that authoritarian tendencies can haunt the present (see Aguilar 1996;Sa'adah 1998;Cruz 2005;Art 2005 as discussed in . Such variation in outcome and impact of transitional justice processes is not surprising given the many different experiences with atrocity that countries have had and the many paths that they have pursued in dealing with the past.…”