Suchergebnisse

Those who study political participation will find that recent investigations have been lacking neither in scope nor methodological sophistication. Participation, once conceived of in rather narrow terms (usually focusing exclusively on voting) and whose study was restricted to certain geographic areas only (the United States and Western Europe), is now taken to include a wide range of activities across the globe. Similarly, the causal factors of participation have been expanded as well, so that currently they include the social-psychological, socio-economic, demographic, structural, historical and cultural. Nevertheless, despite the abundance of inquiry, little progress has been made in the development of theory.

There is no area of investigation in the field of Latin American studies which has attracted more research in recent years than has the dependency theory. Countless words have been written and much academic "blood" has been spilled in the debate over the strengths and weaknesses of interpreting Latin American society, polity, economy, and culture within the framework of the dependency theory. While there is still much heat generated by those who hold differing opinions on the dependency perspective, serious research is proceeding in a number of areas in an attempt to document the ways in which and the extent to which Latin American nations are dependent on forces beyond their control. This paper attempts to further that research by focusing on agrarian public policy in Costa Rica.