NEWS ANALYSIS : Costa Rica’s Election Furnishes a Lesson in Democracy : Central America: Nicaragua will also vote for a president this month. But the civic experiences of the two neighbors are a study in contrasts.

When Oscar Arias Sanchez was elected to govern this country four years ago, his neighbor, President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, sneered.

Costa Rica’s political system, envied by many in Latin America as a model of stability, was a “bourgeois democracy,” Ortega said. “It’s like a lottery,” he added, in which power is “raffled” among factions of the upper class instead of being held by a “popular vanguard” like his Sandinista National Liberation Front.

In less than three weeks, Ortega will eat his words. Largely because of Arias’ efforts to end the U.S.-backed Contra war in Nicaragua, Ortega has agreed to put the Sandinistas’ “vanguard” status and his own job on the line in a highly competitive election with all the “bourgeois” features of any Western democracy.

Arias once suggested privately that the Sandinistas could never win an election under the democratic standards of Costa Rica. Whether or not this is true, Sunday’s smooth election here of Arias’ successor underscored the striking differences between the two neighbors’ experience with democracy.

Some of those contrasts help explain why the Sandinistas hold an advantage over their main rival, the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Opposition Union, in the Feb. 25 election:

-- Costa Rica’s balloting was the 10th in a row to be conducted peacefully since a 1948 popular uprising against vote tampering, a revolution that perfected its electoral system to a science and abolished its army as an anachronism.

Nicaragua, plagued by militarism, has no tradition of open and honest elections. That history, the Sandinistas’ opponents fear, will discourage Nicaraguans from voting against Ortega, out of apathy or fear.

-- Costa Rican presidents are limited to a single four-year term and barred from active politicking for a successor. Arias, despite his enormous popularity, failed to transfer his magic, and his party’s nominee was defeated.

In Nicaragua, Ortega rejected demands by the opposition to outlaw presidential succession. According to opinion surveys, he is more popular among Nicaraguans than his party as a whole. He has capitalized, through effective campaigning, on the Latin tradition of caudillismo, or strongman worship.

-- Costa Rica has solved so many of the political problems besieging other Latin democracies that economic issues get more attention here. Thus, despite an average growth rate of 5% a year under Arias, opposition candidate Rafael Angel Calderon won the presidency with a populist campaign offering a share of the new wealth to the poorest third of the populace.

In a decade of Sandinista rule, Nicaragua’s economy has slumped dramatically. Yet, according to pollsters, Ortega has been at least partly successful in shifting blame to the Contras and their American sponsors and running as a defender of Nicaraguan nationalism.

-- A secondary factor in Calderon’s victory, political analysts say, was Costa Rican voters’ deep suspicion of political dynasties. Their hesitation to vote again for Arias’ National Liberation Party, which has held power since 1982, was reinforced by drug-related corruption charges against some of its leaders. Since 1948, no party here has won three straight four-year terms.

Nicaraguans are suspicious of dynasties too, having helped the Sandinista guerrillas topple the four-decade-old Somoza family dictatorship in 1979.

Yet, while Costa Rica’s revolution was fought to ensure a multi-party democracy, the Sandinistas came to power with the intent to stay there as a revolutionary “vanguard”--a will that still pervades the party’s well-organized ranks and makes it a formidable electoral machine.

On the other hand, leaders of the 14 parties backing Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, Ortega’s leading challenger, are relatively new to politics, having placed their bets on the Contras until that war was undermined by Arias’ peace plan.

Nicaraguan opposition leaders were quick to point to Arias’ party’s acceptance of defeat as “an excellent lesson in democracy” for their country. But Costa Ricans cautioned against comparisons.

“Our system of elections is something we achieved after bouts with dictatorships, fraud and a civil war,” Manuel Araya, a historian, said. “This is not something learned easily by one country from another.”

Observers from other Latin American countries said they were impressed by the openness with which Costa Ricans displayed their allegiances by flying party flags from their houses, and by the swiftness and grace with which Arias and his candidate, Carlos Manuel Castillo, conceded an election decided by four percentage points (51% to 47% of the vote).

And they watched with approval as parents leaving the polls dutifully performed a civics lesson by taking their small children--9,637 of them--to vote in a parallel mock election, won by Castillo.

After nearly a decade of war, it is hard to imagine such a civic fiesta in Nicaragua. For one thing, the absence of voter registration cards, like the ones produced automatically for each Costa Rican reaching age 18, makes vote fraud harder to control and disputes inevitable.

In an effort to offset suspicions of fraud, the Sandinistas have invited hundreds of international observers to watch their elections. One of them, Joao Baena Soares, secretary general of the Organization of American States, said Monday that he was satisfied so far with preparations for the Nicaraguan vote.

Baena Soares, who was here to watch the Costa Rican election, said the two countries cannot be compared.

“Each country has to find its own road to democracy,” he said in an interview. “Here (in Costa Rica) there is a great tradition. . . . What I have seen in Nicaragua allows us to hope that the elections will be clean.”

Other observers said the Costa Ricans’ quick acceptance of the vote count underscored the real test in Nicaragua--not who wins, but whether the election leads to national reconciliation.