Dragon in the Tropics: Hugo Chávez and the Political Economy of Revolution in Venezuela. By Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2011. 195p. $22.95.
Bankrupt Representation and Party System Collapse. By Jana Morgan. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. 384p. $79.95.
The Revolution in Venezuela: Social and Political Change under Chávez. Edited by Thomas Ponniah and Jonathan Eastwood. Cambridge, MA: David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, 2011. 344p. $24.95.
Party System Collapse. By Jason Seawright. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. 312p. $60.00.
Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy: Participation, Politics, and Culture under Chávez. Edited by David Smilde and Daniel Hellinger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 408p. $89.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.
The study of Latin American politics has always generated great new research questions, and within Latin America, no country's experience has generated more interesting questions than Venezuela since the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998. Contemporary Venezuela raises fascinating questions about the collapse of a highly institutionalized party system and the erosion or breakdown of what had been the third-oldest democracy outside of the advanced industrial democracies. What accounts for these stunning developments? What can we learn from them? These issues go to the core of important developments in Latin American politics, and they are major issues for comparative political scientists beyond Latin America.
Through the prism of a burgeoning literature on the origins, nature, and consequences of Chávez's administration, this essay addresses three questions related to Chávez and the breakdown of the 1959–98 regime. First, what explains the collapse of the parties that dominated Venezuelan politics from 1959 to 1993? Seen from the perspective of the dynamics of Venezuelan democracy and the party system from 1959 until 1993, the collapse of the old party system was stunning. Parties created and dominated Venezuelan democracy during these decades. As late as 1994, Michael Coppedge referred to Venezuela as a “partyarchy”; such was the dominance the parties exercised.Footnote 1 Why did a highly institutionalized party system collapse in a relatively short time?
Second, how should we categorize a regime such as the one led by Hugo Chávez? The debate about the contemporary political regime has been highly polarized and wildly divergent. Some scholars argue that democracy has eroded deeply since 1999, while others argue that democracy has deepened. I argue that the regime is a competitive authoritarian regime, but that its participatory mechanisms and the enthusiasm they have generated among a significant part of Venezuela's poor raise classic questions about the limits, possibilities, and nature of representative democracy.
Third, what explains Chávez's consolidation of power and the concomitant erosion or breakdown of democracy? The breakdown differed markedly from the classic pattern, which centered on a military coup. In Venezuela, the breakdown proceeded incrementally, with a gradual erosion of civil liberties and political rights and an increasingly unlevel playing field. Whereas in 1977 Venezuela was an exceptional case because it was one of only three competitive regimes in Latin America, today it is an exceptional case for the opposite reason: It is one of the least democratic regimes in the region.Footnote 2 It is one of only a handful of breakdowns of a competitive regime in the third wave of democratization in Latin America. Thus, in important respects it is an outlier, but at the same time it could be a harbinger of what might come in countries with weak states and poor governance; the leftist presidents of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua have all undertaken measures that have eroded democracy.
Chávez is the most prominent, influential, and polarizing Latin American political leader to come on the scene since Fidel Castro in 1959. He brought about huge changes in his country's political system and economy; has governed for a long time (since 1999); has inspired like-minded political leaders to attempt far-reaching changes in a few other countries of Latin America; and has provoked deep concern in the Venezuelan opposition, in some other Latin American countries, and in the United States. In this context, a substantial literature has emerged on the origins, nature, and consequences of Chavismo.
From Partyarchy to Party System Collapse
Chávez's rise to power in 1999Footnote 3 raises two important and closely intertwined questions. First, what explains how a former coup leader with an antisystem populist message could come to power in a country with strong democratic traditions and once-solid institutions?Footnote 4 None of the works reviewed here centrally analyzes Chávez's rise, though the books by Jason Seawright and Jana Morgan are highly relevant to an understanding of this question. Second, what explains the collapse of the old party system? Venezuela was one of the first countries to experience party system collapse, and it remains one of only a few countries to experience such a collapse.
Both Seawright and Morgan offer agenda-setting contributions on party system collapse. Seawright primarily examines Venezuela and Peru, contrasting collapse in those two countries with noncollapse in Argentina. Morgan focuses on Venezuela but also analyzes three other cases of collapse (Italy, Colombia, and Bolivia; pp. 205–40) and four of survival despite stress (pp. 241–72). According to both authors, Chávez's election in 1998 coincided with the collapse of the old system.
The economic and social failures of the 1980s and 1990s contributed greatly to the demise of the old parties and to Chávez's victory in 1998. During these decades, democracy in Venezuela failed in many respects, including a steep drop in living standards of most Venezuelans and some highly publicized corruption scandals. It might seem self-evident, then, that unprecedented bad economic performance accounts for party system collapse and Chávez's rise.
Seawright and Morgan both argue persuasively for more mediated understandings of the impact of economic decline on party system collapse. In both accounts, economic decline and rising poverty had powerful effects on the party system but did not directly cause its collapse. Both assert that ideological convergence between the two dominant parties of the 1973–93 period, Acción Democrática (AD, Democratic Action) and COPEI (the Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente, a Christian Democratic party) led to a failure of representation, which in turn was a key ingredient in collapse.
Seawright argues that an account of party system collapse must link decisions by voters, choices of party leaders, and system-level outcomes. On the voter side, extensive corruption and a failure by AD and COPEI to represent centrist and leftist voters generated massive disgruntlement. On the party side, he explores reasons for ideological and organizational rigidity that blocked the programmatic flexibility needed to more effectively represent center-left and leftist voters (pp. 21–26, 165–200).
In Party System Collapse, Seawright underscores the inadequacy of an exclusively economic interpretation for party system collapse. Based on Latin American experience from 1980 until 2000, rates of economic growth, inflation rates, and unemployment predict big losses for the governing parties in Venezuela and Peru, but they do not predict system collapse (pp. 75–79). In Venezuela and Peru, the traditional parties lost far more votes than would have been expected due merely to terrible economic performances. A related finding holds at the individual level. Counterintuitively, voters who had particularly negative assessments of economic conditions were not dramatically more likely to vote for a nontraditional party in 1993 (pp. 125–28) or for Chávez in 1998 (p. 132). Bad economic performance, however, eroded support for governing parties.
The author emphasizes the role of corruption in provoking voter anger and making possible Chávez's victory in 1998. Corruption delegitimized AD and COPEI, prompting a precipitous decline in party identification (pp. 89–112).Footnote 5 Voter anger made individuals more willing to tolerate the risk of voting for a political outsider (pp. 144–64).
A failure of ideological representation discredited the old parties and helped make possible Chávez's victory. Venezuelans who felt unrepresented ideologically because neither of the two major parties was close to their own position were more likely to support an alternative presidential candidate (neither AD nor COPEI) in 1993 and Chávez in 1998 (pp. 113–43). Many Venezuelans were ideologically to the left of center, and yet COPEI and AD had positioned themselves, in indistinguishable ways in 1998, on the center-right. Seawright's argument is combinatorial or interactive: It takes both corruption scandals and ideological underrepresentation resulting in declining party identification to produce collapse.
In Bankrupt Representation and Party System Collapse, Morgan argues that collapse resulted from the withering of three kinds of linkages between parties and citizens: programmatic (similar to Seawright's ideological representation), interest incorporation (i.e., corporatism), and clientelistic. The capacity of the traditional parties to provide all three kinds of linkages dwindled as economic performance fell off and as the state downsized and became less capable of offering clientelistic goods. Programmatic linkage failed as AD and COPEI converged ideologically in the 1980s, with Acción Democrática's shift to the right.Footnote 6 The convergence of AD and COPEI deprived Venezuelans of alternatives within the system, leading voters who desired change to seek it from without (pp. 90–121). In the context of Venezuela's economic crisis, constraints imposed by international financial institutions blocked the parties from implementing policies that were more popular (pp. 106–12).
Corporatist linkages withered because of structural transformations in Venezuela (pp. 122–47). The growth of the informal sector in the 1980s and 1990s weakened the parties' capacity to link to society based on representing organized interests. Finally, a declining resource base made clientelistic linkages less effective as decentralization increased the demand for clientelistic provision (pp. 148–74). Morgan summarizes that “it was this linkage failure … not economic conditions alone, that motivated Venezuelans to leave the traditional parties” (p. 186).
The biggest substantive differences between the two authors are that Morgan pays more attention to the demise of clientelistic and corporatist representation; Seawright emphasizes corruption's role in bringing down the old parties more than Morgan; and Seawright (pp. 134–35) is skeptical about the key role of growing informality in the collapse of the party system.
The biggest question I have about both books is the degree to which ideological convergence between AD and COPEI and ideological underrepresentation of the center and left was an important ingredient in party system collapse. Both books downplay the viable established party alternatives that existed on the left as of 1993. The left and center-left were ideologically underrepresented during early decades of the 1959–98 regime, but not by 1993. Seawright and Morgan also underplay the role of contingent decision making by party leaders and Presidents Rafael Caldera and Chávez in bringing about system collapse.
In 1993, the dominance that AD and COPEI had exercised since 1973 crumbled. Longtime COPEI leader and former president of Venezuela (1969–74) Caldera left the party and successfully ran for president on a new label (Convergencia). In 1988 and 1993, two previously minor leftist party alternatives began to serve as outlets for disgruntled voters. MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo, Movement toward Socialism) and La Causa R (La Causa Radical, the Radical Cause) were both created in 1971. By 1993, both parties had become viable options for voters on the left and center-left. The MAS captured 8% of the lower chamber seats in the 1988 elections, its best performance ever. In 1993, La Causa R presidential candidate Andrés Velásquez won 21.9% of the vote, and the party won 21% of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. In the 1993 campaign, Convergencia positioned itself to the left of AD and COPEI. Thus, it is difficult to agree that leftist and center-left voters were underrepresented. Caldera won with only 30.5%, and so La Causa R could reasonably have aspired to contend for the presidency again in 1998, especially with AD, COPEI, and Convergencia in disarray. An explanation of party system collapse, therefore, must account for the reasons these alternatives failed to prosper electorally after enjoying some success in 1993. Had they prospered, the old system would not have collapsed.
Caldera's and Chávez's decisions and those of MAS and La Causa R leaders were very important in the breakdown. Caldera's defection from COPEI dealt a severe blow to his former party.Footnote 7 Because Caldera had long been COPEI's most prominent leader,Footnote 8 COPEI suffered further damage from his government's serious shortcomings. In 1994, in what proved to be a highly consequential decision, Caldera pardoned Hugo Chávez, who was in prison for having led a coup in 1992. If Caldera had not pardoned Chávez, the party system might not have collapsed some years later because Chávez was a key figure in that collapse.
It was specific decisions by MAS leaders in the context of a painful and protracted economic demise and a growing political crisis—and not the party's ideological or programmatic positions—that blocked its subsequent path and opened the way to Chávez. MAS's decision to support Caldera's successful presidential bid in 1993 gravely damaged its ability to present itself as a fresh alternative in 1998. It bore the price of association with an administration that had presided over bad times. In 1998, MAS then supported Chávez. An internal schism within La Causa Radical in 1997, after which one of the two splintering factions supported Chávez in 1998, undermined its capacity to serve as a programmatic alternative within the existing system. Also, at different moments, AD and COPEI had the option of alternative paths, crystallized in the form of different party leaders and presidential candidates, that might have achieved better results and helped avert their abysmal performances in the 1998 presidential election.
Both books argue that the party system collapsed in the 1998 election, but the death of AD and COPEI occurred under Chávez as a result of his deliberate efforts to wipe them out. Footnote 9 In 1998, AD elected the largest delegation of any party to the Senate (20 of 59 seats) and the Chamber of Deputies (62 of 202 seats). COPEI elected 8 senators (14% of the upper chamber) and 27 deputies (13%), the third largest delegations in both chambers.Footnote 10 These were meager results compared to the past, especially for COPEI, but the parties did not collapse in 1998.
In sum, contingent decisions by party leaders, Caldera, and Chávez were important ingredients in the collapse.Footnote 11 The balance between agency (or contingent decisions) and more systematic explanation has long been a contested subject.Footnote 12 Theories about party system collapse reasonably prioritize regularities and commonalities, as Seawright and Morgan do. The protracted and deep economic decline, corruption scandals, and declining party identification were probably necessary conditions—and certainly weighty factors—in the collapse of AD and COPEI. But agency was also very important in deciding the outcome. In moments of regime crisis and change, contingent decisions by leaders usually hold more weight in determining huge outcomes about the political regime (and in Venezuela, about party system collapse) than is the case in more stable and less uncertain situations.Footnote 13
There is much to praise about these well-researched and well-argued books. Both have much to offer well beyond the analysis of Venezuela. First, they open a new research agenda on party system collapse, with important implications for other kinds of rapid and deep party system change, such as the sudden demise of a formerly important party, which has been a common event in contemporary Latin America.Footnote 14 A lot of work on party systems has sought to explain stability or gradual change and adaptation. Yet many cases in the third and fourth waves of democratization have experienced high volatility and deep and rapid change. Seawright's and Morgan's insights into what provokes radical change also have the potential to illuminate party system stability.
Second, both Seawright and Morgan show that work on profound party system change should consider both the supply side (politicians' decisions) and the demand side (voters' choices) of this equilibrium. Both effectively consider why voters defected from COPEI and AD and why leaders of these two parties were not able to respond to voter concerns.
Third, Seawright and Morgan convincingly argue that it is essential to carefully examine the politics of economic decline, rather than inferring directly from economic results to political outcomes. Both examine the dynamics of parties and voters in order to understand the collapse of the old system, rather than simply positing that bad economic performance directly caused collapse. Both skillfully use evidence from the micro level (individual survey attitudes) to draw conclusions about a macro-level outcome.
Seawright links individual-level data about political attitudes and voting to a macro political outcome in especially innovative ways. Many theories and arguments in political science rest on dubious untested assumptions about individuals' preferences and motivations. With the abundance of survey data that is now available, and with advances in knowledge about political psychology, we as a discipline can do better in exploring the microfoundations of macro processes. Seawright's book is an exemplar of how to do better. It also stands out for its impressive command of multiple methods, including public opinion surveys, survey experiments, and surveys of party leaders, and for ingenious testing of causal mechanisms.
Debates about the Political Regime
Debates about how to define democracy and classify political regimes go back to Aristotle, and they have been recurrent throughout the history of modern political science.Footnote 15 Some of the most polarized debates about contemporary Venezuelan politics revolve around these issues. How should we categorize and conceptualize the political regime in Venezuela and others that are somewhat like it?
Some authors argue that from the outset, Chávez had strong authoritarian proclivities and embarked down a path of gradual dismantling of democratic institutions and growing authoritarianism. In sharp contrast, many scholars toward the left of the political spectrum see contemporary Venezuela as a bastion of participatory democracy and social justice. This debate invokes some classic questions in comparative politics about the definition, nature, and limits and possibilities of representative democracy.
Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold are leading Venezuela experts, and Dragon in the Tropics is a cogent, quick-to-read, and well-informed account of Chávez's regime. These authors view the regime as increasingly authoritarian. They usually refer to it as a hybrid, but they also call it an “electoral autocracy” (p. 2) and “illiberal” (p. 8). They document great centralization of power, attacks upon the opposition that go beyond the bounds of democratic politics, the banning and exiling of opposition politicians, an exceptional use of public-sector resources and jobs to favor political friends and punish opponents, widespread firing of public-sector employees who opposed Chávez, the emasculation of institutions of horizontal accountability, the curtailing of freedom of the press, and an increasingly uneven playing field. These characteristics all put contemporary Venezuela decisively outside the realm of democratic regimes. Other scholarly critics and human rights advocates have made similar arguments.Footnote 16
In contrast, several authors in the two edited volumes under review, The Revolution in Venezuela and Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy, see Venezuela as a participatory (or radical) democracy. The Revolution in Venezuela provides a wide panorama of views about the Bolivarian Revolution, focusing on the degree to which social and political change has occurred under Chávez. Chapters cover a wide range of topics: anthropological reflections on the 2002 coup against Chávez, government–opposition relations, participatory democracy, the 2006 elections, women's rights, the economy, health care, and Venezuela's international relations. The volume includes both strong defenders and trenchant critics of the Chávez government, representing at least six (depending on what one counts as separate) academic disciplines.
Several chapters in The Revolution in Venezuela champion the view that contemporary Venezuela is a participatory democracy. While noting some of the unresolved problems, Gregory Wilpert's chapter on participatory democracy largely heralds the use of referenda, community councils that have some authority over local public projects and budgets, citizen assemblies, and other mechanisms for local level participation. Carles Muntaner, Haejoo Chung, Qamar Mahmood, and Francisco Armada (who served as Chávez's minister of health and social development from 2004 to 2007) write enthusiastically about local-level participatory experiences with health care, improved access to health care for the poor, and better outcomes. In the conclusion, coeditor Thomas Ponniah talks about “the creation of a democracy that is more direct, self-representative, and expressive” (p. 284).
In the words of coeditor David Smilde, Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy focuses on “phenomena outside of the central institutions of the state…. Political discourse and exchange occur not only in ministries, congresses, and parties but also within and at the intersections of the multiple networks that make up what is often referred to as civil society” (p. 2). This volume, too, is an interdisciplinary collection, involving scholars from six different disciplines. Many of the authors base their chapters on extensive fieldwork about level grassroots experiences in Venezuela.
The chapters cover a wide range of local initiatives and experiences. In “Defying the Iron Law of Oligarchy: How Does ‘El Pueblo’ Conceive Democracy?,” political scientist Daniel Hellinger examines attitudes about democracy in 11 popular-class neighborhoods and six middle-class neighborhoods. The data reveal much about what Venezuelans would like from democracy. Anthropologist Naomi Schiller analyzes a community television project supported by the government and run by the community as a way of examining how relatively poor citizens create state institutions to further their own goals. Sociologist Sujatha Fernandes analyzes the contributions of a community radio project to participatory democracy. She concludes that “the greatest potential for developing forms of participatory democracy may not be with those that are identified with or against the government, but those who retain a level of organizational independence while making strategic alliances with the state” (p. 156). Although her analysis is persuasive, in contemporary Venezuela, because of intense politicization at the local level and unyielding centralization and control of funding at the top, it is difficult for popular-sector organizations to navigate “a level of organizational independence while making strategic alliances with the state.” Historian Alejandro Velasco analyzes activism and protest in a popular-sector neighborhood in Caracas from the 1960s to the 1980s. He shows that this past history of intense popular protest belies “a historical genealogy that rests on the rise of Hugo Chávez as the redeemer of long-suffering popular sectors” (p. 180). Other chapters discuss online political debates and women's poetry.
Most of the contributors to Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy are sympathetic to Chávez. Smilde, for example, speaks of “deepening democracy” or “participatory democracy” (p. 11). Margarita López Maya and Luis E. Lander offer a mainly laudatory assessment of participatory democracy under Chávez, and they criticize the 1959–98 democratic regime as being restricted exclusively to the political sphere.
To my mind, the notion that contemporary Venezuela is a participatory (or radical) democracy is a conceptual mistake. Like most US-based political scientists, I follow a procedural definition of democracy: It is a political regime with free and fair elections for the executive and legislature, nearly universal adult enfranchisement in the contemporary period, the protection of political rights and civil liberties, and civilian control of the military.Footnote 17 The Chávez regime falls far short on the first and third of these defining characteristics of democracy. The electoral playing field is highly skewed, and respect for opposition rights has eroded seriously. The military is much more politicized and more involved in politics than it was before Chávez.
To be a participatory democracy, a regime must first be a democracy. Enhanced opportunities for popular political participation might make a democracy more democratic, but they do not make an authoritarian regime a participatory democracy.Footnote 18 Nor does the mere holding of competitive elections qualify a country as “democratic,” even if its elites sometimes appeal to (what they call) “democracy” and derive their power from election results and populist forms of mobilization.
Venezuela has become a paradigmatic competitive authoritarian regime as defined by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way:
Competitive authoritarian regimes are civilian regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but in which incumbents' abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vis-à-vis their opponents. Such regimes are competitive in that opposition parties use democratic institutions to contest seriously for power, but they are not democratic because the playing field is heavily skewed in favor of incumbents. Competition is thus real but unfair.Footnote 19
Competitive authoritarian regimes have long been important in Latin America and elsewhere. Antecedents in Latin America include the second term of Juan Perón in Argentina (1951–55), Mexico under the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) from 1985 until 2000, and Alberto Fujimori's presidency in Peru from the 1992 palace coup until 2000. In the Western Hemisphere today, the delegitimation of openly authoritarian regimes and of the norms of the United States and Organization of American States against coups make competitive authoritarianism an attractive option for some leaders with autocratic proclivities. The regimes in Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Ecuador have exhibited tendencies toward competitive authoritarianism although they are not as full-blown cases as Venezuela.
The Venezuelan regime today is a participatory, mobilizational, competitive authoritarian regime. In this sense, it is different from Fujimori's demobilizing regime in Peru between 1992 and 2000 and from many competitive authoritarian regimes that Levitsky and Way analyze in their recent book.
Even popular organizations that strongly support the regime leadership are deeply affected by functioning within an authoritarian regime. Several analyses show that the authoritarian nature of the regime penetrates these grassroots organizations. María Pilar García Guadilla's chapter on “Urban Land Committees: Co-optation, Autonomy, and Protagonism” in Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy analyzes the tension between popular organization autonomy and state control. She emphasizes both the innovative character of the popular organizations known as urban land committees and the potential for state control of them. The urban land committees were created by presidential decree, and they are institutionally affiliated with the vice president of the country. In “Advancing Women's Rights from Inside and Outside the Bolivarian Revolution, 1998–2010,” (in The Revolution in Venezuela), Cathy A. Rakowski and Gioconda Espina note that one of the main women's organizations, INAMUJER, “has two mandates: to serve the revolution and to promote women's rights” (p. 183). They astutely analyze the contradictions between these two mandates and note the growing predominance of the former objective.Footnote 20
In their chapter in Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy, Kirk A. Hawkins, Guillermo Rosas, and Michael E. Johnson present a fascinating analysis of the “misiones,” ambitious and expensive social programs created in 2007. They provide convincing empirical evidence that state control over the misiones is strong: “They are heavily dependent on funding and decisions made by national leaders. In most senses they are simply part of the state” (p. 197). The educational programs “have a strong ideological flavor emphasizing the Bolivarian Revolution” (p. 192). Paid workers in these social programs have diverted their efforts toward working on Chávez's political campaigns, and as of 2005, only 10% of the teachers in a large educational program had previous teaching experience (p. 193). The programs have been plagued with cronyism and political favoritism. Program spending has been heavily biased by political considerations, and most programs' investments have not been based on universalistic objective criteria (pp. 201–11).Footnote 21 To a lesser degree, such practices are part of democratic politics in Latin America and beyond, but they cut against the recent tendency toward nonpoliticized, universalistic, conditional cash transfers in Brazil, Mexico, and other countries. And they could undercut citizenship by making education and other public goods conditional on political support rather than universal entitlements.
Some advocates of the idea that contemporary Venezuela is a participatory democracy focus on social justice at the expense of liberal democracy, as if policies oriented toward the poor made a regime more democratic. López Maya and Lander observe that “[s]upporters of the Bolivarian political project understand democracy not only as the enjoyment of civil liberties and the exercise of political rights but also, in a very emphatic way, as social justice and social equality” (p. 63, Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy).Footnote 22
Although substantive outcomes might be more important for poor people than the procedures embodied in liberal democracy, it creates a conceptual muddle to include substantive outcomes in a definition of democracy unless it further describes a political regime that is unequivocally democratic. A democracy that prioritizes more egalitarian substantive outcomes can be called a social democracy or an egalitarian democracy—but only if it is first democratic. Whether democracy produces greater equality and better outcomes for the poor is an empirical question of great normative importance, not a defining characteristic of democracy. Treating it as a defining characteristic of democracy runs the danger of diminishing the practical and normative importance of the civil liberties, associational freedoms, and polyarchal institutions that make it possible for diverse groups, including lower-class groups, to politically empower themselves and to press their claims for greater equality and social justice. In addition, it is doubtful that the radical left embodied by Chávez has achieved a way of promoting equality and opportunity that is as sustainable and effective as the moderate left.
On the other hand, Chávez's scholarly supporters highlight important dynamics about the Venezuelan regime and implicitly pose challenging questions for advocates of liberal democracy, especially in contexts of poverty, inequality, and social hierarchy. Chávez's regime has created many new venues for popular participation, and it enjoys significant popular support. Participatory experiences have helped generate an enhanced sense of political efficacy among poor Venezuelans.Footnote 23 Thus, while the regime is increasingly authoritarian, some societal conditions potentially favorable to democracy have blossomed under Chávez.
It is interesting to note that support for democracy as a political regime and satisfaction with democracy have increased significantly since 1998. According to the 1998 Latinobarómetro survey, 60.3% of Venezuelans said that “Democracy is always the best form of government,” and 35.4% said that they were very or rather satisfied with democracy. In the 2011 Latinobarómetro, these numbers increased to 77% and 45%, respectively.Footnote 24 The increase in satisfaction with democracy underscores one of the sources of Chávez's power—his ability to retain popular support.
Another accomplishment of the Bolivarian Revolution is the sense of cultural and political empowerment that many poor Venezuelans have enjoyed since 1999. Under the conditions of stark inequality and social hierarchy that afflict most Latin American countries, the achievement of rapid cultural leveling and cultural/political empowerment of the poor under liberal democracy has been an elusive task. Chávez has arguably been more successful than all representative democracies in Latin America at promoting a sense of empowerment among the poor.
Chávez's ability to promote popular participation and inspire the popular imagination raises interesting questions about representative democracy and whether it can become more inclusive politically and more participatory in Latin America.Footnote 25 At the local level, leftist municipal governments in Brazil and Uruguay have used participatory institutions to deepen representative democracy and used representative democracy to nurture popular participation. Unlike the situation in Venezuela, in Brazil and Uruguay local participatory democracy has reinforced democracy at the national level, and vice versa. These experiences have attracted great attention and inspired enthusiasm far beyond Latin America.Footnote 26
At the national level, however, there are severe, largely insurmountable limits to the effort to institutionalize participatory democracy.Footnote 27 The scale of the polity and the great complexity of aggregating individual preferences at the national level; the huge information asymmetries between politicians and experts, on the one hand, and citizens on the other; the need for expertise to make many decisions; time limits of citizens; the need to protect minority rights; and the influence of moneyed interests all conspire against participatory democracy at the national level.Footnote 28 When they undermine representative democracy at the national level, efforts to create more “authentic” forms of democracy empower new elites and create new hierarchies of authority that are less open to contestation.
Representative democracy does not easily or automatically satisfy some deep human desires, such as participation and social and political recognition, that is, the right to be treated decently and enjoy full citizenship. These limitations are intrinsic to representative democracy, even though in principle it is always possible to further democratize a democracy. Representative democracy can incorporate meaningful popular input beyond elections, especially at the local level, but elected officials and appointed bureaucrats necessarily make most important decisions.
Except for short bursts of time, representative democracy rarely inspires the deep passion of grassroots militants that Chávez has inspired, or promotes the profound sense of involvement and empowerment that millions of poor Venezuelans have found under Chávez. But intense political passion has had a down side in contemporary Venezuela: intolerance. Representative democracies with a commitment to the welfare of the majority can do a lot to improve the material conditions and life opportunities of poor Latin American citizens, and can thereby create the conditions that might help those citizens more fully enjoy their rights and exercise their citizenship.Footnote 29 Some representative democracies in Latin America, including Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Mexico, have achieved significant reductions in poverty over the last decade or more. In fact, from 1990 to 2009, poverty dropped much more in Brazil (from 48.0% to 24.9% of the national population) and Chile (from 38.6% to 11.5%) than in Venezuela (from 39.8% to 27.6%). Poverty fell sharply under Chávez, from 49.4% in 1999 to 27.6% in 2009, but almost half of this decline represents a reversion to the 1990 level.Footnote 30
The Consolidation of Competitive Authoritarianism and the Erosion of Democracy
What makes possible the consolidation of competitive authoritarianism and the erosion or even the gradual breakdown of democracy under democratically elected presidents? Since the end of the Cold War, the phenomenon of presidents who, like Chávez, came to power through democratic elections only to incrementally emasculate liberal democracy has become more common on a world level.Footnote 31 In parallel, the number of competitive authoritarian regimes has expanded. Understanding competitive authoritarian regimes and these new forms of democratic breakdowns and erosions have become central questions in comparative politics.Footnote 32
Venezuela is a paradigmatic case of the incremental erosion of democracy, characterized not by a single dramatic event such as a military coup but, rather, by a sequence of steps that cumulatively represent an erosion or breakdown of democracy. This erosion or breakdown is remarkable given the country's democratic trajectory from 1959 until the late 1980s. When Chávez was elected, Venezuela had the third-oldest democracy (after Costa Rica and Colombia) in the world outside of the advanced industrial democracies. Strong parties formed the foundation of this regime, and oil revenue was the lubricant.
Democracy has unraveled in many places and times, but there is no historical precedent of such a clear erosion in a country that had experienced democracy for so long. Among Latin American cases, Venezuela had the oldest democracy that ever broke down. Its per capita GDP in 1977 made it one of the wealthiest countries that has experienced a breakdown.Footnote 33 Moreover, the erosion and breakdown in Venezuela occurred after the Organization of American States adopted measures designed to prevent democratic breakdowns, such as Resolution 1080 of 1991 and the Inter-American Democratic Charter of 2001.
Venezuela is a particularly interesting case of competitive authoritarianism. In Latin America, Chávez has been the most important leader of a competitive authoritarian regime because of the influence he has exercised on other countries, because he has reshaped Venezuela far more profoundly than any of the recent Latin American presidents who have presided over competitive authoritarian regimes, and because Venezuela is the biggest Latin American country among those that have experienced competitive authoritarianism for an extended time.
The works under review agree that the economic and social failures and corruption scandals of the 1959–98 regime made it far easier for Chávez to consolidate power. These failures delegitimated the old parties and created a widespread yearning for something different. They also agree that the extraordinary boom in oil prices after 1998 helped Chávez consolidate power. In real terms, crude oil prices hit a post–World War II low in 1998 at $16.80 per barrel, and they subsequently increased nearly sixfold to $97.33 a decade later.Footnote 34 Booming oil prices promoted exceptionally rapid economic recovery and growth from 2003 to 2008. Chávez's takeover of the state oil company, PDVSA (Petroleos de Venezuela), in 2003, and the subsequent decision to fund social programs from oil revenues, enabled the government to triple (in real terms) per capita social spending from 1998 to 2008. Social spending increased from 11.3% of GDP in 1998 to 21.7% by 2006.Footnote 35 The combination of rapid economic recovery starting in 2003 and dramatic increases in social spending cut the poverty rate sharply.
In other respects, the works under review diverge in their accounts of Chávez's consolidation of power. Corrales and Penfold argue persuasively that the decay of the 1959–98 party system was an almost necessary condition for the subsequent erosion of democracy and consolidation of competitive authoritarianism. The demise of the old parties created an institutional vacuum that made it far easier for Chávez to dismantle the old regime. A progressive evisceration of other democratic institutions was key to the consolidation of Chávez's regime. Intimidation through such mechanisms as firing public-sector employees who had signed a recall petition made it costly for undecided voters to defect to the opposition. Chávez's step-by-step maneuvers to seize ever more control of state institutions and to weaken mechanisms of “horizontal” accountability made it more difficult for the opposition to challenge the regime (Dragon in the Tropics, pp. 14–46).
In contrast, Chávez sympathizers greatly emphasize material conditions for the popular sectors, grassroots democracy, and the empowering of the poor as keys to his consolidation of power. Wilpert's “Venezuela's Experiment in Participatory Democracy,” in The Revolution in Venezuela, argues that Chávez's popularity stems as much from participatory grassroots mechanisms as from the government's social programs. In Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy, López Maya and Lander write that “[t]he enthusiastic participation of previously excluded social sectors has been increasing and extending throughout all of the country” (p. 76). Whereas critics assert that the government squandered the oil boom on unsustainable and inefficient government spending aimed at bolstering political support,Footnote 36 Mark Weisbrot, in The Revolution in Venezuela, argues that Chávez's policies are more sustainable than most economists have judged.
Both sides of this debate contribute toward an understanding of Chávez's consolidation of power and the concomitant erosion or breakdown of democracy. Chávez's systematic gutting of the mechanisms of horizontal accountability made it far easier for him to consolidate power. To provide one example, he undermined the autonomy of the court that oversees national elections, the Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE, National Electoral Council). In turn, his control over the CNE made it possible to manipulate the timing of referenda and elections. In August 2003, the opposition gathered 3.2 million signatures, far more than enough for a recall referendum, but the CNE declared that Chávez had not been in power long enough to permit a signature drive for a recall referendum. In November 2003, the opposition presented a new list for a recall referendum, this time with 3.6 million signatures. The CNE declared that only 1.9 million of the signatures were valid and, hence, that there were not enough valid signatures to trigger a recall vote. In May 2004, the opposition again gathered enough signatures for a recall referendum, and this time the CNE validated the signatures. By then, the economy was starting to recover quickly after a prolonged and steep decline. Chávez's public-opinion approval rating shot up, and he won the referendum, 58% to 42%. Several opposition analysts alleged that extensive fraud took place, but the CNE validated the official vote count. Without the CNE's machinations, Chávez would have faced an earlier recall referendum under clearly less favorable circumstances.Footnote 37
At the same time, Chávez has won the fervent loyalty of a significant part of the Venezuelan population. This loyalty does not stem exclusively from the economic benefits that have accrued to poor Venezuelans since 2003. His charismatic personality, his fiery populist discourse, his bellicosity, his symbolic appeal stemming from his humble origins, and opportunities for grassroots participation have deeply resonated with a majority of poor Venezuelans.
Some pro-Chávez scholars, and also Hawkins, Rosas, and Johnson in Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy, underscore the cultural/affective dimension of this popular enthusiasm. These authors note that his followers accord Chávez “affection or even reverence, and … sacrifice many of their programmatic objectives for the good of the movement” (p. 209). Hawkins's innovative book on Chávez and populism further develops these themes.Footnote 38
This recent work suggests interesting points about symbolic and affective dimensions of power and politics. Chávez's personal charisma, populist discourse, and polarizing political style have helped him cultivate popular support and remain in power. Political scientists are not always adept at capturing these popular sensibilities about politics. Scholars from other disciplines have often done a better job of illuminating some of these dynamics. Many essays in The Revolution in Venezuela and Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy capture these popular sensibilities even if they do not always situate these local dynamics within the context of an increasingly authoritarian regime at the country level.
To summarize this discussion, because of the high costs of military coups in the post–Cold War West, incremental erosions and breakdowns of democracy (à la Chávez) and the establishment of competitive authoritarianism have become important phenomena. The survival of competitive authoritarian regimes depends vitally on the leadership's ongoing capacity to maintain considerable popular support. But at the same time, these regimes also depend on the dismantling of democratic checks and balances. Chávez's political genius has been his capacity to cultivate deep and fairly broad popular support while simultaneously eviscerating democratic checks and balances, but not in such egregious ways that it would invite international sanction.
Conclusion: Broader Implications of the Venezuelan Experience
The collapse of a once highly institutionalized party system and the incremental erosion or breakdown of a long-established democracy in Venezuela raise several points of broad interest to political scientists. First, these stunning events should serve as a reminder of the fact that the history of political regimes is full of unexpected and largely unpredictable change. The Eastern European democratic revolutions of 1989 were unexpected,Footnote 39 as was the dramatic wave of democratization that transformed Latin America from a region with 17 openly authoritarian regimes in 1977 (out of 20 countries) to one with only one authoritarian regime just 14 years later.Footnote 40
Unanticipated and highly important change offers opportunities for political scientists to ask new questions, challenge old paradigms, and provide new answers. The collapse of the Venezuelan and Italian party systems demonstrated that a past history of strong parties does not guarantee party system stability, democratic stability, or good governance.Footnote 41 The classic literature on parties never contemplated the possibility that a highly institutionalized system might collapse. Likewise, a past history of strong democratic institutions does not guarantee their strength into a distant future if things go badly enough.
Latin America is a region that has often been characterized by unanticipated and profound political changes, and social scientists should be particularly cautious about invoking the concept of path dependence to explain what goes on there. Path dependence in Venezuela would have implied a continuity of strong parties and stable democracy. Likewise, path dependence for Latin America would have implied a continuation of authoritarian rule in many countries that had little or no experience with democracy before the third wave but that have had durable, if not always solid, competitive regimes since then. Venezuela has deviated from its previous path in profound, illuminating, and perhaps even contagious ways. Of course, past histories influence the present and future, but countries with weak democratic institutions and occasional regime change are subject to more dramatic upheaval—and less linear, less predictable paths—than those with strong institutions and a highly stable regime.Footnote 42
In contexts of deep regime crisis and change, leaders' decisions typically have more impact in reshaping a country's path than in more stable, institutionalized, and predicatable settings. This has certainly been the case in Venezuela since the 1959–98 regime began to crumble in the wake of massive popular revolts in 1989. Chávez has reshaped Venezuela in profound ways, and as I argued earlier, contingent decisions by Caldera and party leaders were decisive in the breakdown of the 1959–98 party system. The important role of actors' contingent decisions in these contexts is the opposite of path dependency. Strong path dependence implies that outcomes are dictated not by contingent decisions by key actors but by past trajectories and preferences.
The second point of interest to political scientists is that prospects for authoritarianism are alive and well in the countries with weak states and poor governance, despite the expectations of those who hoped that markets and democracy had definitively triumphed in Latin America. The Venezuelan case, preceded by Peru in the 1990s and followed by Nicaragua and to a lesser degree Ecuador and Bolivia in the 2000s, shows that competitive authoritarianism can flourish in the contemporary era. The routes to authoritarianism, however, are more varied, often more incremental, and usually more subtle than in the past. The era of frequent successful military coups and open dictatorships is something of the past, at least for now. The incremental paths to competitive authoritarianism deserve continued attention because on a world scale, they have become increasingly important.
The Venezuelan experience under Chávez runs counter to Levitsky and Way's generally sound argument that it is difficult to consolidate competitive authoritarianism in the Western Hemisphere because of high linkage to the United States. Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia today are also arguably cases of competitive authoritarianism.Footnote 43 Chávez created an example of how to skirt international pressures against authoritarianism in the Western Hemisphere, and his example inspired others to follow a roughly similar path. Participatory competitive authoritarianism is an effective way to skirt international pressures for democracy because popular electoral support, coupled with local participatory mechanisms, can enable plebiscitarian presidents to claim that they are the “true” democrats. The Organization of American States and the United States are very hard pressed to articulate a coherent response to incremental paths to competitive authoritarianism and to constitutionally questionable actions by legislatures to remove democratically elected presidents from power (such as occurred with Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo in June 2012).
Third, to return to an old theme about the political economy of oil-rich developing countries, it is impossible to explain the regime outcome in Venezuela without reference to the political effects of oil. The collapse of oil prices in the 1980s and 1990s imperiled the old regime, and the dramatic surge in oil prices greatly facilitated Chávez's consolidation of power.Footnote 44 Flush times since 2003 have made it easier for presidents to govern on the left, just as the deep economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s made it more difficult.Footnote 45 Oil insulated Chávez from US opposition, and it helps explain Venezuelan exceptionalism to the difficulties of establishing competitive authoritarianism in the Western Hemisphere after the Cold War.
Finally, the Venezuelan case underscores that even at the high level of development that Venezuela enjoyed in the 1970s, democracy can break down and formerly strong parties can collapse if things go badly enough for long enough. An economic and social decline of the extraordinary magnitude and duration that Venezuela faced beginning in 1977 had a withering effect on established parties and democracy. Per capita GDP in constant 2000 US dollars fell from a peak of $6,548 in 1977 to $5,132 in 1998, when Chávez was elected, and then declined steeply to $3,966 in 2003.Footnote 46 By 2003, the magnitude of this decline (39%) was unprecedented in Latin America's experiences with democracy since at least 1945 (and most likely ever).Footnote 47 Unemployment, the size of the informal sector, and poverty increased sharply, and income inequality grew worse. Bad performance battered all of the parties that governed from the late 1970s until 1998: AD, COPEI, MAS, and Convergencia.
These observations about the dreadful economic and social results in Venezuela from the late 1970s until 2003 suggest an important caveat to my earlier assertion that democratic erosions and breakdowns are possible in the Western Hemisphere. Democracy broke down in Venezuela only after a very long period of bad performance, some high-profile corruption scandals, and a withering attack on the old parties and institutions by a charismatic president (Chávez) who enjoyed considerable popular appeal and has governed for a long time. In today's Western Hemisphere, democracy is vulnerable mainly (probably only) where democratic governance falters and where party systems are in disarray. In the short to medium term, a big reverse wave of authoritarianism is highly improbable because, thankfully, many countries in the region are doing reasonably well, have reasonably solid parties, and therefore are very unlikely to experience breakdowns.
