Alcance del sistema de gestión de las mediciones

Latin American culture is the outcome of distinctive historical trajectories followed by the countries in this region. In turn, these trajectories will help understand the region´s elite dependence, its cycles of authoritarianism, and its pronounced social inequality. As Htun (2000) states, the beliefs and values system in contemporary Latin America, which are based on Ibero-Catholic culture, still today resembles that of their Spanish and Portuguese conquers, rather than that of the Anglo-protestant culture of US and Europe (ibid.: 191).

In fact, Latin America was a by-product of the 1500s Spanish and Portuguese conquest

that exported its Hapsburgian model of political authority to the region.111 _{This model}

was characterised by feudal traditions where militaristic, absolutists, class-based, rigidly Catholic and orthodox, and mercantilist attitudes were the dominant traditional

values imposed during the sixteenth century’s occupation.112 The next three centuries

109 _{For a more detail account about the difference between materialist and post-materialist values, see}

Inglehart’s paper (1988) ‘The Renaissance of Political Culture’ American Political Science Review, vol. 82.

110 _{Although these two reasons will be treated separately in the following paragraphs, it is worth}

mentioning here that the link between them (historical accounts and its resulting distinctions on people’s values) seems to be a good approach to conceptualise the notion of political culture in the Latin American region.

111 _{The Hapsburgian model refers to the political strategy developed by Spain and Portugal during the}

sixteenth century to achieve unity and centralisation. The results of the centralising, unifying steps were to eliminate the corporate and autonomous groups of powers in order to pave the way of a solid monarchy. Because of such elimination, also the hope for future Spanish and Portuguese democracy went away (Véliz 1980).

112 _{According to Wiarda, the transference of these set of values had an impact on all areas of Latin}

American life. For instance, the political system was top-down and authoritarian. The economy was mercantilist, exploitive, and statist. Socially, the system was two class and hierarchical. As for religion, orthodox, monolithic, and absolutist were the values imposed by the Catholic Church, which at the same time it played the important role of being the base of all social, political, economic, and cultural beliefs. The educational and legal precepts also followed the precepts of the Catholic Church. Finally,

of colonial rule did not have a clear effect on changing the value system imposed in the region (Wiarda 2001). Instead, during this time those sets of traits became deeply rooted and were internalised generation after generation by society, becoming part of their everyday life. Moreover, the influence of the colonial domination from the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies was so powerful that they managed to isolate the winds of ‘cultural’ change that modern Western civilisation were trying to implement

in Europe and North America.113

However, it was not until the eighteenth century that the conservative, very catholic, monolithic, and political and economic system implemented in Latin America began to disintegrate due to the influence of the Enlightenment movement that used to dominate the world of ideas in Europe. This movement was an ideological revolution led by a group of more rationalistic monarchs that came to power in Spain and Portugal during this century. It introduced liberal reforms in order to end the abuses of the church and state (Htun 2000). To a certain extent these reforms were implemented relatively successfully in most part of the society because Latin America’s urban and political structures –i.e., military, church, bureaucracy and feudal elites- began experiencing modest strains of liberal and rationalists’ ideas. Nevertheless, people from the countryside remained traditional, conservative and Catholic. The asymmetry in Latin America political culture between peasants and those living in the cities bred divisions and added tensions that led to the independence from Spain and Portugal during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Without doubt the Latin American war to win the independence was characterised by the challenge that liberal and republican ideologies exerted over the traditional Neo- Scholastic orthodoxy. As a result, liberalism reached power in some countries, but only temporarily. Yet, after some years of independence, conservative and reactionary forces staged a comeback and dominated politics in most Latin American countries. The common factor of this period was the permanent dispute that conservative and liberal ideologies had in order to reach political power. In fact, from both ideologies,

intellectually, the system was top-down and based on root memorisation of Catholic precepts and deductive reasoning (Wiarda 2001, p. 346).

113 _{As a matter of fact, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Western European countries were}

moving in a modern direction by different events such as the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the English Revolution, which took them to an era of liberal thinking and emancipation. However, none of these currents of thought had an early political socialisation in the Latin American region.

the liberal one was weaker making a stark contrast with its counterpart in Europe and North America. This feature of Latin American liberal ideology was due to its lack of mass support or legitimacy, the top-down hierarchical structure and elitism dominated by the conservatives, and because liberalism was not able to fully develop a market economy based on private enterprise and economic freedom. Consequently, Latin American liberalism died in the last decades of the nineteenth century and economically in the first decades of the twentieth (Htun 2000, p. 347). So, in the early twentieth century -after almost three centuries of colonialism and ninety years of independence- Latin America’s political culture still was, as Anderson (1967) described it, strongly shaped by Catholic political assumptions such as the supremacy of God and his authority; conservative, non-(even anti-) liberal; centralised, and therefore, mainly authoritarian; and the society was still dominated by three elite groups –church, oligarchy, and the military- (ibid.: 158).

However, the political, social, economic, and cultural changes in the international sphere broke down Latin Americas’ isolation from the rest of the world, which pressured the region to change its traditional political culture system. In fact, in the early twentieth century and mainly with the rise of the Great Depression, new groups (e.g. middle class) began to clamour for a social change that enabled them to be part

of the political system.114 _{Although in the 1930’s and 1940’s the working class was}

included into the political arena, its inclusion was not as smooth and quick as that the middle class (Johnson 1958). Presumably, there were two reasons for this. First, the working class was large in numbers (mass politics), and therefore, their insertion required a great deal of care to organise them into the system. And second, labour

groups had a different political ideology to those held by the traditional elites.115 By

1960s peasants were co-opted by the system which meant that political elites adopted

114 _{In this regard, according to Johnson (1958), by 1920s, in advanced countries such as Chile and}

Argentina, groups from the middle class: business, commercial, industrial, and importer-exporter groups were admitted into the system but as a part of the existent oligarchical elite, while in less– industrialised countries such as Dominican Republic and Honduras these groups were absorbed into the system but as part of the military elite.

115 _{As a matter of fact, labour groups were organised on a Marxist, syndicalist, or communist basis that}

implied a completely different political ideology to the one of the traditional-elite groups. This bottleneck was settled by a negotiation process where the political elites elaborated labour codes and new social welfare programs designed to give benefits to the organised workers in return for labour’s giving up its revolutionary pretentions. However, at this time in history, those radical- Marxists groups or union workers that neglected to accept elite’s rules were either suppressed by the government or left outside of the political system.

agrarian reforms and other agrarian programs, not so much to redistribute land but to absorb them into the political system and give them limited benefits as a way of

defusing potential rural-based revolutions116 (Wiarda 2001, p. 289; Hausmann, et. al.,

2014).

The slow and almost precarious change in the Latin American political culture was not only due to the pressure of social groups wishing to be part of the political system, but also to the changes produced by industrialisation on the value system of the population (Ellner, et. al. 2007). Unlike Europe and North America, where industrialisation started by the late nineteenth century, in Latin America urbanisation and industrialisation took place later; specifically, during the decades between World War I and II. Certainly, Industrialisation undermined earlier feudal and medieval social structures and gave rise to vast social changes. Thus, the Church –and its religious influence- was probably one of the most affected traditional institutions that underwent social pressure. It became less important while sentiments of indifference and

secularism began to take over. Although the region remained nominally Catholic,117

the downturn in religion observance had a profound effect on the social and political

systems in Latin America (Levine 1981).118 Such subtle secular change brought

important transformations on people’s life perceptions. Thus, increasingly new ideas

about egalitarianism, democracy, social justice,119 _{and individual rights began to}

infuse Latin America by the 1950s.

Along with the religious decay, another factor that played an important role in changing political culture was economics. Industrialisation brought the re-birth of Corporatism as political ideology, and its economic interpretation of society. The Corporatist economic model was seen -during the 1930s-1940s- as a third way between what then seemed to be a failed capitalism (liberalism) and an unacceptable

116 _{From the 1970s and continuing to the present the insertion of women and indigenous groups into the}

system has been a constant struggle in different countries with heterogeneous outcomes.

117 _{According to Levine (1981), by the 1980s only 10% to 15% of Catholics actively practice their}

religion. At the same time, he also shows evidence that the number of Catholic orders, charity, education, hospitals, social services, and so forth went all down.

118 _{The rise of secularism and eventually Protestantism and other beliefs in twentieth century had the}

long-range effect of gradually undermine the influence of the Catholic beliefs and theology that had long undergirded the society and polity (Levine 1981).

119 _{For instance, people started questioning the old idea of a God-given hierarchy among persons, of}

natural human inequalities, that poverty is good for the soul, or that children should be malnourished and diseased because God had willed it that way (Wiarda 2001, 293).

Marxist-Leninist model of development. According to Wiarda (2001), Corporatism is often referred to as a conservative political philosophy that ‘would seek to ameliorate the problems (rootlessness and alienation) of modern mass man but without the class conflict of Marxism or the anarchic individualism of liberalism’ (ibid.: 250). That is, Corporatism sought to restore the ideas of brotherhood, social peace, community, and class harmony by implementing an economic model based on the growth of modern state planning, and social welfare programs carried out under state auspice and of the integration of (and control over) interest groups through top-down government

administration (Aron 1970).120 Thus, under the influence of a Corporatist economic

model, elites continued receiving the means by which they could control and regulate lower-class groups who were increasingly challenging them from below.

Nevertheless, by early 1950s, Corporatist Latin American elites managed, only partially, to fulfil its more important promise of granting full inclusion of the rising working class into the political, social, and economic system. As a result, this failure brought a vast socioeconomic gap and inequality among the population. This, in turn, opened a window of opportunity for a brief democratic interlude which gave a renewed hope to liberals and democrats, an ill-functioning of the democratic and for a Fidelista version of Marxism (in Cuba).

None of these three ideologies achieved a majoritarian status.121 _{On one hand, during}

1930s to late 1970s, the emphasis of the liberal economic model was on import-

substitute industrialisation (ISI).122 _{According to Buxton (2001), ‘[u]nder the ISI}

model state subsidies and protections from imports was extended to the domestic sector as a mode to catalysing growth’ (ibid.: 39). That is, this model sought to build domestic industry and reduce the dependency on imports from foreign countries. To do so, governments acquired a central role by taking direct actions to stabilise the economic cycle throughout the implementation of policies such as: (i) nationalisation,

120 _{In fact, according to Malloy, virtually every regime that came to power in Latin America in the 1930s}

and 1940s was infuse, in some way or another, with this corporatist ideology and programs. That is, it is impossible to understand Latin America during this period without coming to grips with the phenomenon of corporatism (Malloy 1977).

121 _{At this respect, Wiarda argues, that in leading countries like Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and others, the}

left (Marxism) could command from 15% to 30% of the vote; the centre (Liberalism) could also get 25% or 30%; and the right (Corporatism, conservatism, authoritarianism) the other one-third of popular sentiment (Wiarda 2001, 349).

122 _{The countries that pursued this model with more determination were México, Argentina and Brasil,}

(ii) subsidisation of vital industries, (iii) increased taxation to fund the latter, and (iv) protectionist trade policies. Despite the ISI strategy managed to achieve a rapid process of urbanisation, increasing domestic employment, and economic self-dependence; such results were not enough to solve the structural economic problems.

Hence, due to the disappointing results such as inefficient and obsolete industries

unable to compete with the new industries in developed countries, the model was gradually abandoned by Latin American countries in the early 1980s. The lack of competitiveness was accompanied by high levels of unemployment that produced increasing levels of inequality and poverty, and, therefore, a strong decrease in the region’s GDP levels (Portes, et. al., 2005).

Because of its inefficient outcomes, a new neoliberal model of development quickly replaced the ISI model during the 1980s-1990s. The neoliberal model came, in part, by pressures from the United States and the international lending agencies arguing that in order to become a dynamic, growth-oriented economy in the modern, global era, Latin American countries had to downsize their states, privatise, cut tariffs, and enable market liberalisation. In other words, as Watson (2004) emphasises, neoliberalism implied ‘a wholesale change in the relationship between the state and society, with a more vigorous embrace of the market being part of a generalised withdrawal of state provisioning and action’ (ibid.: 165).

The outcomes achieved by the implementation of the neoliberal model over democratic performance and people´s political culture can be regarded as mixed in the region. On the upside, it can be argued that ‘neoliberalism and market reforms enhanced international protection for democracy in the region’ (Weyland 2004, p. 138), and it also brought a coherent global change involving a reorganisation of the

state, the class structure,123 _{and new values for citizens (Petras 1997, 85).}

Economically, Latin America reached a much higher level of development compared to what it had achieved during the 1950s. Socially, with new escalators of upward mobility, the region was also more pluralistic than in earlier decades. And politically,

123 _{By the end of 1990s, neoliberal social programs caused that the region was 70% more urban}

compared to 70% rural only four decades earlier. It was 70% literate compare to 70% illiterate in the 1950s (Weyland 2004, p. 148).

the region witnessed the birth of new dynamic political parties, labour movements, and technocratic elites (Wiarda 2001, 295).

The downside, unfortunately, came from the failure of the neoliberal model to

consolidate the social forces necessary for its stabilisation (Harris 2000).124 This

resulted in the early onset of crises that would weaken its course. In fact, the three largest Latin American economies were the theatre for the most dramatic crises that jeopardised the hegemony of this model. The crises of Mexico in 1994, Brazil in 1999 and Argentina in 2002 showed that neoliberalism was crumbling as it was unable to deliver satisfactory and definitive cures for the worrisome social and economic

problems these countries were facing (ibid.: 325).125 Further, national debt expanded

exponentially and regional economies became highly vulnerable, helplessly exposed to attack from speculators (Walton 2004).

From the analysis conducted above it seems that history and early socialisation constitute powerful determinants for the conceptualisation of political culture in Latin America. This has shown the strategic role that a small number of political actors –i.e., elites- have had within Latin American society. Overall, elites were, and still are, capable of accommodating themselves in order to avoid losing political power by changing as they please the rules under which a political regime should follow. This is precisely the reason behind Wiarda’s suggestion to invite political scientists in the region to take into account –and probably study more- the key role that political elites have had to influence the political order across the time. In his words Wiarda claims that ‘the improvisations, flexibility, adaptability, remarkable survivability, and sheer genius that Latin American elites have shown in protecting their power structure, [have enabled them] to survive and thrive well during region’s history’ (Wiarda 2001, 282).

124 _{In fact, in most countries, the urban working class, the peasantry, the rural workers, the lower sectors}

of the salaried middle class, the members of the large informal sector, and the indigenous communities have been largely excluded or marginalised from the policy making process under the implementation of Neoliberalism (Harris 2000, 149).

125 _{For instance, although the ravages of hyper-inflation were solved, this was only achieved at the cost}

of high unemployment rates; economic development –for a decade or more- was paralysed; the concentration of wealth grew greater than ever before; public deficits spiralled and the mass of the population had their rights expropriated, most notably in the domain of employment and labour relations.