Political Culture and Institutional Development in Costa Rica and Nicaragua: World-Making in the Tropics, Consuelo Cruz, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 281.

Political Culture and Institutional Development is a groundbreaking historical analysis that seeks to understand the role of political culture, rhetorical discourses and identity formation in explaining the divergent dynamics of democratic development in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. In the same critical vein through which Jeffery Paige, Edelberto Torres, Deborah Yashar, and Andres Perez-Baltodano—each from different theoretical perspectives—have sought to discern the contrasting dynamic of polities' formation in Central America, Cruz advances an integrative, in-depth study nurtured by “elements of rationalist, structural and cultural theories” (1).