Without trust democracy becomes inert. Is social capital an answer? A study on Latin America

Abstract

Why do the countries in Latin America seem to experience a more ineffective economic and political development compared with the more industrialized nations? This is the central question that underlies this article. The paper argues that despite the undeniable advances in the institutional poliarquic engineering, serious problems of political representation exist, as well as problems in the economic and social dimension. This situation, in our point of view, is due to the existence of a reactive knowledge, which turns difficult the development of new strategies of analysis capable of incorporating the complex nature of Latin America. In this context, we argue that the type of democracy in this region is of an inertial nature, because the matrix of social exclusion, although new, remains intact. One of the mechanisms that could be useful to create alternative knowledge is social capital, mainly because it allows testing the new theorems generated by new perspectives of analysis. Through the use of secondary data, we observe the existence of a hybrid and passive political culture, which does not contribute to the establishment of a normative basis of support for democracy. We conclude by showing, based on empirical data, that the concept of social capital is very useful in the promotion of collective action and consequently in the advance of democracy.

Key words: Latin America, social capital, democracy.