Democracia e cultura : da cultura política às práticas culturais democráticas

Based on post-positivist assumption, this paper aims to demonstrate that the contributions from sociological neo-institutionalism are those which best contribute to a normative and simultaneously useful definition of cultural studies, within the Theory of Democracy, given the input that they bring, particularly from areas such as social history, cultural anthropology, sociologies of culture and new social movements that are based on notions of culture as praxis. This study is an attempt to describe those contributions, demonstrating some of their advantages but also their limitations, as well as show that the post-Geertzian concept of culture as a semiotic practice, is the most appropriate to identify, describe and explain the symbolical variables of democratic political regimes as non-domination political systems