This article offers a critical path on the concept of political culture. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the heuristic value of this debate for the investigation of the object in Latin America. The theoretical reflection is underpinned on authors of political science and social anthropology. It is hypothesized that the discussion offers useful took for the investigation of politics in the subcontinent. However, literature also presents a conceptual tension when it comes to distinguish between political culture and political identity. So it is concluded that the usefulness of the meaning for scientific research is to contemplate the distinction between the material dimension of the nomenclature, the subjective and structural symbolic scope of the object.