Political culture has remained an attractive subject since works such as Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (1963) propelled it to the fore of comparative politics in the 1960s. Over the last four decades, different approaches to political culture sought to provide theoretical leverage on an array of political phenomena, including political participation, modernization, democratic development, and state building. The appeal of the concept of political culture lies primarily in its intuitive logic: Individuals, organized into groups, are responsible for the creation of political realities. While these realities may certainly be influenced by an array of exogenous factors, their creation is dependent on individuals' perceptions and preferences. Critics of political culture research suggest that attributions of political culture are frequently deterministic or difficult to falsify scientifically. In Political Culture and Institutional Development in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Consuelo Cruz analyzes political culture employing what she refers to as an integrative approach, a rational-structural culturalism that recognizes the direct influence of morally driven, rational political actors on institutional norms.

While Cruz's comparative analysis focuses on Central America, a good part of the book is dedicated to “redefining political culture” (p. 4). Specifically, building on the conceptualizations of political culture operationalized in works including those of Ronald Ingelhart (Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society, 1990) and Robert Putnam (Making Democracy Work, 1993), Cruz explains that “[o]ur understanding of culture itself has shifted significantly” (p. 28) since these works first appeared. Building on constructivist foundations emphasizing identity as an intersubjective construct, she “tries to avoid functionalism and voluntarism” (p. 29) by 1) assuming that political invention is delimited by credibility or truth; 2) understanding that rhetorical politics may in fact destabilize political actors' goals by shifting “the collective field of imaginable possibilities” (p. 30); and 3) accepting that political actors are “embedded in the same collective field of imaginable possibilities” (p. 30) while focusing solely on what “political actors make discursively explicit” (p. 31).

Cruz then seeks to show how her reconceived, rhetorical approach to political culture helps to explain democratic development. Utilizing a most-similar-system design, she chooses two “small, peripheral economies” that are both “former possessions of the Spanish Crown” and, therefore, are both Catholic and Spanish speaking (p. 8). Focusing mainly on the endogenous differences in the postcolonial experiences of her Central American cases, she traces the process of collective identity formation and political development in Costa Rica and Nicaragua over five centuries. In doing so, she draws from a diverse body of literature analyzing the development of political institutions—which she refers to as “regimes of arbitration”—and the ways in which their construction was dependent on the normative scheming of political actors pursuing particularist agendas through the manipulation of rhetorical frames. The author highlights the intrinsic differences between neighboring Costa Rica and Nicaragua in their collective identities, how those differences have shaped the moral dispositions of political actors and, by structuring the field of imaginable possibilities, have helped to influence political development in these two cases.

While the historiography is well documented and thorough, a number of issues rooted in comparative methodology are worthy of note. First, while the case selection is interesting given the developmental difficulties in Nicaragua in contrast to Costa Rica, little time is dedicated to explaining the case selection, its rationale, weaknesses, and generalizability. In fact, the deduction of the comparative research design is left to the reader to glean and begs the question of why the case selection is limited to these two countries. Certainly the impressive depth of the historical analysis is the first assumption to spring to mind. However, given that the analysis spans five centuries and is rooted in the process of independence from the Spanish Crown, why not analyze all of the countries that sought independence from Spain through the Plan of Iguala or those comprising the United Province of Central America? Given that the design is not cross-regional as implemented, such an extension may, at least, provide a greater test of the political culture thesis as proposed, given the diversity in the region.

This leads to a second point concerning Costa Rica's “exceptionalism” and the theoretical leverage provided by the analysis. Costa Rica is credited with developing a robust regime in a vulnerable neighborhood thanks to a “narrative of collective virtue” (p. 264) and a belief in the importance of virtue, harmony, and stability—what Cruz calls “normative realism.” This is in direct contrast to Nicaragua, whose national narrative promoted a “Manichean system of normative scheming” (p. 146). As Cruz points out, “Costa Rica remains the Central American exception” (p. 8). But rather than understand this exception by considering the importance of such factors as resources, commerce, access to indigenous labor, relationship with the Crown, and regional centers of power, or the level of liberal/conservative conflict, she often dismissed these factors outright and is content to subsume exceptionalism under “political culture.” As an example, in response to frequent socioeconomic explanations, the author contends that “in fact, the countries' (Costa Rica and Nicaragua) endowments of indigenous labor were not radically unequal” (p. 34). But she gives no evidence of this other than a discussion of later labor shortages, given the decimation of the Nicaraguan indigenous population. However, this does little to address the perception of endowments and how that perception affects reality. There is little work done to dissuade readers from other approaches, while one is left with the frequently nagging impression that this historical construction is difficult to falsify.

Third, Cruz's approach is at times muddied by her attempt to integrate too much into political culture. While trying to avoid the pitfalls of functionalism and voluntarism apparent in other work, she suggests that her central arguments flow from rational choice, structuralism, and culturalism (p. 6), while engaging the “complex relationship among history, structure, and agency” (p. 17). The problem is that while her broad-mindedness is a virtue, she does too little to show how all of these discourses can truly be incorporated within her “political culture” approach.

The book offers an in-depth historical analysis of the role of political actors anchored in an environment of norms, rhetorical frames, and culturally bound possibilities. It offers an impressive historiography of Costa Rica and Nicaragua since the Spanish conquest, and argues for a political culture approach that integrates history, structuralism, and individual agency into our understanding of paths to development. Unfortunately, the book tends to suffer from the same limitations of many political culture analyses, despite its attempt to reconceptualize political culture and its breadth of historical material. However, it does highlight the importance of political actors in shaping their own destinies, which is as central now, as new democracies struggle for survival, as it was at the dawn of Latin American independence.