Political CCulture and rational choice in Latin America

Interfaces within democratization studies

Abstract

This comparative review of studies on Latin America’s democratization processes focuses primarily on those scholars addressing current transformations in the political culture of mass publics (self-declared ‘culturalists’) and those addressing the behavior of the elites from a rational-choice perspective (deemed ‘rationalists’). The review argues that these mutually exclusive approaches share ever more common ground in the issues they explore, both as a consequence of internal developments within each and of their competition with new lines of interpretation within Latin America — lines which border on theirs and/or are actual alternatives. All this is generating new interfaces and presenting fresh research challenges in this area of studies.