What feeds on what? Networks of interdependencies between culture and institutions

Culture and institutions both matter in shaping trajectories for socioeconomic progress. As the debate on causal directionalities between culture and institutions is still ongoing, we recast its perspective: a complex network of symbiotic relationships ties a multitude of cultural and institutional factors together. We blend the institutional complementarities literature with symbiosis theory, and place it into the context of a data-driven approach that extends correlation network analyses. We frame each single interdependence between a cultural and an institutional factor as an asymmetric symbiotic relationship in which a ‘host’ feeds a ‘symbiont’: the latter is more dependent on the former. In our computed network, each relation locates within a broader context of pathways and network constellations. We apply our approach to Brazilian municipal data. Our results confirm high complexity in the coevolution of culture and institutions and suggest an emerging pattern in which cultural factors are more likely to be hosts than institutions or social capital. In the Brazilian municipal reality, the institutional innovation of participatory councils bears the potential of game-changer in the system, while tax collection strongly depends on cultural factors i.e. the (in)formality of the economy and family ties.