This book contains a good deal of useful information for the academic specialist. The authors discuss in great detail the bases, mechanics, and findings of a large sample survey of political attitudes in Venezuela conducted in 1973. Different chapters cover the social context of political opinion, the social context of political experience, cultural diversity and political cleavage, and partisanship. Seven appendixes provide extensive data on the survey itself, including a full Spanish text of the questionnaire. There is no bibliography, but notes are extensive.
The authors’ aim is to take the methods, insights, and goals of politically oriented North American survey research and use them in Latin America. Venezuela is a useful and appropriate case, given the freedom, openness, and high degree of party organization and partisanship which mark its political system. The book provides particularly interesting data on the role of socioeconomic status and religiosity in politics, on party membership and partisanship, and on the gradual emergence of new bases of political orientation in Venezuela.
To order their findings, the authors make reference to a great variety of hypotheses, propositions, and general orientations drawn both from survey research and from the general study of Latin America (an example of the latter is their reference to “theories” of cultural monism). Unfortunately, these are not well sorted out, and the reader occasionally faces a confusing welter of concepts and data of different kinds and levels. Moreover, the authors’ answers to theoretical questions are all too often simply restatements of the questions themselves, or attempts at nominal definition (pp. 97, 110). The absence of a clear theoretical focus becomes a problem in assessing the meaning of what are often weak relationships and in making sense of deviations from “expected” results (for example, the inability of standard modernization theory to explain patterns of participation in Venezuela).
All in all, this is an intelligent, well-done, and valuable work, but at a number of key points one would have liked more systematic reflection on the meaning of the findings.
