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STATISM, EMANCIPATION and the LEFT: UNDERSTANDING UNCONVENTIONAL POLITICAL PARTICIPATION in COSTA RICA1 Elías Chavarría-Mora2

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STATISM, EMANCIPATION and the LEFT: UNDERSTANDING UNCONVENTIONAL POLITICAL PARTICIPATION in COSTA RICA1 Elías Chavarría-Mora2 STATISM, EMANCIPATION AND THE LEFT: UNDERSTANDING UNCONVENTIONAL POLITICAL PARTICIPATION IN COSTA RICA1 Elías Chavarría-Mora2 Abstract Ideology has been traditionally considered to be an explanation of political behavior, both inside and outside academia, which has been nowadays mostly abandoned. This paper sets out to inves- tigate if a relationship between ideology and unconventional po- litical participation exists, for the Costa Rican elections of 2014. It yields results that indicate that while the majority of Costa Ricans do not engage in political participation, there is a minority that does, with an identifiable emancipatory, statist and leftist ideolo- gy. A strong contradiction is found in the population between their ideological self-identification and their values and attitudes. The paper then argues in favor of more nuanced measurements of ide- ology than self-identification questions. Furthermore, it becomes apparent that each form of participation has a different relation- ship with the ideological elements.Therefore, studying them as if they were one should be avoided. Key words: ideology, political participation, Costa Rica, political values, political attitudes 1 This paper was based on a thesis written by the author while he was a re- search assistant at the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Políticos at the Uni- versity of Costa Rica. The author would like to thank Ciska Raventós, Diego Fernández, Gerardo Hernández, Allan Abarca, two anonymous reviewers who kindly offered their suggestions and specially Adrián Pignataro and Ilka Tre- minio for their support and commentary on his research. 2 The author is a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of Pittsburgh and has a licenciatura and a bachelor’s degree in the same field from the Uni- versity of Costa Rica. He has previously published in the Revista de Derecho Electoral of the Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones of Costa Rica and collaborated as a researcher for the Programa Estado de la Nación - Conare. His areas of interest include political culture and values studies, ideology, political beha- vior, quantitative methodologies and Latin America. He can be reached at: +1 (412) 519-8378, [email protected], and lives in 5506 Fifth Ave. 106D, Pittsburgh, PA, 15232, USA. 128 REVISTA LATINOAMERICANA DE OPINIÓN PÚBLICA / NÚMERO 8 (1), 2019 I. Introduction Since the word “ideology” was introduced in the social sci- ences, the concept has been understood as a force driv- ing the actions of individuals. Intuitively we have come to expect political actions to be in accordance with people’s stated beliefs. Even more, the type of participation will be based on the ideology that individuals adhere to: The left demonstrates on the streets, whereas the right would en- gage through legal action, for example. These are common conceptions from everyday life that however could or could not be true, and as they are so commonplace, it would be interesting to corroborate if indeed they are correct. Ideology, however, has been progressively abandoned in political science as an explanation for behavior, being re- placed nowadays by either rational choice models or by the standard socioeconomic status model.This paper in no way argues in favor of abandoning either of those models, as po- litical participation is clearly a phenomenon with a plethora of causes; but rather because of this, other plausible explan- atory models should be investigated, and, amongst them, those that consider ideology an important variable. As the relationship between ideology and conventional types of participation has become somewhat neglected, the case has been even more so for other forms of political par- ticipation. This could be due to the relatively recent interest in these unconventional forms of participation. Therefore, this paper sets out to investigate if there is indeed a relationship between ideologies, which interpel- late and organize political attitudes and values, and uncon- ventional political participation. It does so for the case of Costa Rica during the presidential election of 2014, using the Cuarta Encuesta de Cultura Política y Comportamien- to Electoral (Fourth Survey of Political Culture and Electoral Behavior), and particularly taking advantage of a new set of ideological questions in it, which allows for a more detailed approach to the subject, coupled with a multivariate analy- sis that goes beyond simple descriptive statistics. REVISTA LATINOAMERICANA DE OPINIÓN PÚBLICA / NÚMERO 8 (1), 2019 129 One of the key ironies with regards to ideology is the constant declarations of its demise coming from both the left and the right (an ideological classification itself), while at the same time the world experiences a revival of ideological movements: Islamic fundamentalism, anti-imperialist-revo- lutionary nationalism, neo-authoritarianism in formerly-suc- cessful examples of democratization in Eastern Europe, po- litical neopentecostal evangelism (Eagleton, 1997: 13), and now we can add to these the growth of radical or alt-right groups in the United States, Europe and beyond. II. Ideology and political participation Left, right and beyond: Ideology, values and political attitudes On everyday parlance, ideology is widely understood to mean a strict and biased understanding of reality. Classi- cal American sociology developed a definition that fits in- to this outlook and emphasized the lack of flexibility as its main characteristic. Edward Shills defined it as, for exam- ple: “explicit formations, closed and resistant to innova- tion” (Eagleton, 1997: 22, translated by the author). Similar definitions can be found in the works of Daniel Bell, Ray- mond Aron and the political scientist Robert E. Lane (Ea- gleton, 1997). Campbell, McClosky and others introduced the topic to political science in the sixties, when it became common in the field to speak of political beliefs as integrated and co- herent groups, focused on how to distribute resources on societies (Alcántara, 2004; Kuklinski and Peyton, 2007), “Political ideology serves as the glue that constrains and integrates political belief systems” (Kuklinski and Pey- ton, 2007: 46). There is an idea that ideology interpellates the individual, as questions designed to measure ideology “tap people’s predispositions to accept or resist the politi- cal communications they receive from their environment” (Kuklinski and Peyton, 2007: 59). 130 REVISTA LATINOAMERICANA DE OPINIÓN PÚBLICA / NÚMERO 8 (1), 2019 A problem with this definition quickly arose as research- ers started to notice the lack of coherence in attitudes and values. Converse recognizes their existence, but as “idio- syncratic constructions” (Converse, 2007: 149), whereas Lane (1962) and Semetko (2007) identify changes in po- litical attitudes as random and without coherence or logic, thus political scientists started to speak of the population not having ideology. Perhaps it is possible to move away from this predica- ment by incorporating other traditions that have further developed the concept of ideology. Critical theorists, neo- marxists and the sociology of knowledge arrive at a com- mon understanding of ideologies as “webs of significance”, composed of arrays of images, symbols, opinions, attitudes and values that relate to each other; they are a system, but that does not imply perfect coherence. (Adorno et al., 1950: 2; Sartori, 1969: 400; Laclau, 1986; Laclau and Mouffe, 1987; Eagleton, 2003: 119, 224). The way that ideologies work is by interpellating indi- viduals based on their values and attitudes, themselves or- ganized by the ideologies, functioning as a cognitive short- cut (Sartori, 1969; Van Dijk, 1998; Kuklinski and Peyton, 2007: 46). Values and attitudes both seek to influence hu- man behavior, as they exist only in the mind of the individ- uals, there is no way to measure them directly. Therefore, it is important to infer them by the way people evaluate activ- ities and situations (Almond and Verba, 1963; Inglehart and Klingemann, 1979; Van Dijk, 1998; Halman, 2007). Figure 1 represents the relationship between attitudes, values, ideology and participation. Values are the base of attitudes, both are contained and organized by ideologies, and as such the three pull the individual towards partici- pation, as ideologies are visual images that represent “gen- eralized social and political values that individuals may wish to see realized in a given political system (Fuchs and Klingemann ,1990: 213 in Opp et al., 1995: 66). REVISTA LATINOAMERICANA DE OPINIÓN PÚBLICA / NÚMERO 8 (1), 2019 131 Figure 1. Relationship between values, attitudes, ideology and political participation Ideology Political Political Political values attitudes participation This more nuanced understanding of ideology also illumi- nates a pressing measurement problem. In almost all po- litical behavior research, ideology is measured asking a self-identification question. The problems with this are nu- merous: most individuals have no political knowledge to properly identify themselves according to their values, at- titudes and policy preferences;3 there is also the danger that they will identify superficially with an ideology but be guided in their policy preferences by a completely different set of values and attitudes.4 Using a single left-right scale also presents a problem when individuals have a complete- ly different understanding of what those poles mean.5 Fi- 3 As it would be demonstrated later in this paper, most Costa Ricans self-iden- tify as center
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