The Institutional Framework

Abstract

Conventional explanatory frameworks often depict Latin America’s institutional structures as static and inflexible. Some conclude that the economic successes of Western Europe were not transferable to Latin America. Others shun potentially misleading international comparisons outside the region, especially with North America. Institutional rigidities are perceived as derivative of cultural traits fixed by traditional ideologies or mindsets; anchored by colonial institutional structures; and labeled as semifeudal, neoscholastic, patrimonialist, absolutist, corporatist, and so on. Although it identified the proximate causes with external factors, even dependency thinking found the root causes of dependency in deficiencies of the Iberian institutional legacy – in concentrations of power, transnationalism, or entrepreneurial inadequacies among the elite. This tendency toward cultural determinism in Latin America’s institutions falls in sharp contrast to the predominant narratives of North American institutional history. Contrast, for example, William Parker with Stanley and Barbara Stein. Parker tells how colonial settlers in North America almost immediately broke apart the mercantilist and corporate forms of organization that founded their colonies, whereas the Steins tell how rigid Iberian mercantilist institutions debilitated Latin America and subordinated it to peripheral status. Or compare Richard Morse with Alexis de Tocqueville. Morse characterizes Iberian emigrants to Latin America as encumbered by the moral obligations of the Old World social hierarchy, which they carried with them and used to create a New World social order that mirrored the Old World’s organic social hierarchy of race, birthplace, and nobility. This perception of inflexibility in institutional transmission differs from Tocqueville’s description of European migrants to North America carrying both the seeds of liberalism and the moral obligations of social hierarchy.

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