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.

文化和制度在塑造社会经济进步轨迹方面都很重要。由于关于文化和制度之间因果方向性的争论仍在继续，我们重新审视了它的观点：一个复杂的共生关系网络将众多文化和制度因素联系在一起。我们将制度互补性文献与共生理论相结合，并将其置于扩展相关网络分析的数据驱动方法的背景下。我们将文化因素和制度因素之间的每一个相互依存关系构建为一种不对称的共生关系，在这种关系中，“宿主”喂养“共生体”：后者更依赖于前者。在我们的计算网络中，每个关系都位于更广泛的路径和网络星座上下文中。我们将我们的方法应用于巴西市政数据。我们的结果证实了文化和制度共同进化的高度复杂性，并提出了一种新兴模式，在这种模式中，文化因素比制度或社会资本更有可能成为主人。在巴西市政现实中，参与式委员会的制度创新具有改变系统游戏规则的潜力，而税收在很大程度上取决于文化因素，即经济和家庭关系的（不）正规性。