Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy, edited by David Smilde and Daniel Hellinger, is the latest collection of papers to examine political transformations in the country since Hugo Chávez's rise to power in the late 1990s. Now, more than a decade into Chávez's ‘Bolivarian Revolution’, the book attempts to distinguish itself from previous volumes by assessing the impact of the revolution on different aspects of civil society, with particular reference to the ‘new discourses, identities, networks, and forms of association’ (p. 1) that have emerged. In doing so it attempts to shine a light on domains of social and political life in Venezuela that lie beyond the formal institutions, parties and actors of government.
The book is loosely structured around the themes that form the subtitle. The first part focuses on participation and politics, and examines the extent to which citizen participation in practice lives up to the ideals and rhetoric of Chávez's vision of a protagonist democracy. The second part focuses more on the cultural context of contemporary Venezuela. Carolina Acosta-Alzuru examines how society is represented in telenovelas; Luis Duno Gottberg examines how ethnicity is represented in the media; and Elizabeth Gackstetter Nichols examines how women are represented in poetry.
Politics in Venezuela is frequently presented in stark terms: as a protagonist, participant democracy, or as a semi-dictatorship. But these binary oppositions are misleading and, as this book shows, the reality of Venezuela is far more complex. The best chapters are those that move beyond abstract theorising and provide empirical evidence on these complexities, examining the tensions that exist within the Bolivarian experiment, both between supporters and opponents of Chávez, and among the supporters themselves. Drawing on a variety of different methodological approaches these chapters provide rich empirical evidence on how ordinary Venezuelans react to, reinterpret and reproduce the struggles and political conflicts articulated at the elite level, and how the Bolivarian Revolution works in practice.
Daniel Hellinger's initial chapter examines popular attitudes towards democracy among people from two ends of the social spectrum. Using an innovative survey design, Hellinger compares the attitudes of people selected from barrios known for their activism and organisation with the more middle-class residents in urbanizaciones (gated communities). This comparison is instructive since, in theory at least, the ‘activist’ barrio residents should be one of the groups most receptive to Chávez's vision of a protagonist democracy, and the urban middle class should be one of the groups most hostile to it. If polarisation is not found between these two groups, it is unlikely that it will be found anywhere. Hellinger's findings are revealing. Although there are sharp differences between the two groups in terms of their policy preferences and how well they think the main political institutions function, there is less difference between them than one might expect in terms of their normative views of what they think democracy ought to look like and how the economy should be managed.
In chapter 4 Naomi Schiller provides a richly detailed ethnographic account of the struggles faced by Catia TVe, a Caracas-based community TV station, which was formed as a counterpoint to the private media stations that represented the barrios in a negative light. Their motto is ‘Don't watch TV, make it!’, and viewers generally only tune in to ‘watch themselves or people they know’. Schiller examines the ways in which this tiny community outfit faces and responds to hostility from the private media stations on the one hand, and battles to assert its independence from the state, and the accusation that it is a ‘boot-licking network of the regime’ on the other. This case study provides an interesting entry point into examining larger questions about the role of the media in Venezuela, and the relationship between private media, public media and the state. Schiller shows that the relationship between the state and local community media in Venezuela is not as hierarchical as is sometimes assumed, and that local autonomy is vigorously contested, a topic which is also developed in chapter 5 by Sujatha Fernandes.
Chapters 2 and 3 provide overviews of the social policies that have been pursued by different organisations under the Chávez government. Margarita López Maya and Luis Lander discuss the role of the misiones (social programmes), paying particular attention to Barrio Adentro and Mercal, and María Pilar García-Guadilla discusses the role of urban land committees.
In chapter 7 Kirk Hawkins, Guillermo Rosas and Michael Johnson provide an in-depth empirical examination of the misiones, which builds on the more conceptual earlier chapters. Hawkins, Rosas and Johnson interview officials, workers and participants in a variety of different misiones to get an idea of what people really think about them in practice, and collect data on participation rates in different misiones to see who is benefiting and getting access to the resources that the misiones provide. In doing so, the authors investigate a highly controversial aspect of Chávez's policy, testing the claim that he uses these social programmes in a clientelist way to ‘buy’ support. They argue that, rather than fostering civil society, the misiones are ‘very top down’ and are ‘heavily dependent on funding and decisions made by national leaders’ (p. 197), but nonetheless manage to create a ‘participatory and protagonist democracy’ by energising local party activists and creating a ‘sense of idealism and autonomy’. The results from their analysis are extremely thought-provoking. The authors show that participation in the Sucre and Ribas schemes is highest in ‘swing’ constituencies, suggesting that the allocation of social programmes may have been specifically targeted toward these constituencies in an attempt to and bolster support for Chávez.
Taken together, these chapters make a number of important observations. First, supporters and opponents of Chávez are not nearly as polarised on the ground as they are at the elite level. Second, even among supporters of Chávez there are numerous instances and avenues of dissent and contestation. But third, the ideals of a protagonist democracy still fall some way short in practice. The book's main contribution is therefore to highlight some of the tensions that exist within contemporary Venezuelan democracy, and to show the diverse ways in which citizen participation expresses itself. The strength of the book is that it shows that serious empirical research on Venezuela is being undertaken, though more empirical chapters would have given the volume greater depth.
