Social correlates of party system demise and populist resurgence in Venezuela

Latin American Politics and Society, Fall 2003 by Roberts, Kenneth M

ABSTRACT

Considering its strong, highly institutionalized two-party system, Venezuela was surely one of the least likely countries in Latin America to experience a party system breakdown and populist resurgence. That traditional party system nevertheless was founded on a mixture of corporatist and clientelist linkages to social actors that were unable to withstand the secular decline of the oil economy and several aborted attempts at market liberalization. Successive administrations led by the dominant parties failed to reverse the economic slide, with devastating consequences for the party system as a whole. The party system ultimately rested on insecure structural foundations; and when its social moorings crumbled in the 1990s, the populist movement of Hugo Chavez emerged to fill the political void. This populist resurgence both capitalized on and accelerated the institutional decomposition of the old order.

The landslide election of Hugo Chavez to the presidency of Venezuela in 1998 provided perhaps the most clear-cut evidence yet of the enduring vitality of populism in contemporary Latin American politics. A short decade earlier, populism-conventionally understood as a form of personalistic leadership that mobilized diverse popular constituencies behind statist, nationalistic, and redistributive development models-had been considered all but extinct in the region. A variety of scholars had written its epitaph or extolled its demise, consigning populism to an earlier stage of historical development (Drake 1982) or condemning its association with economic instability (Dornbusch and Edwards 1991).

The crisis-ridden denouement of Alan Garcia's ill-fated government in Peru, arguably the most ambitious populist experiment of the 1980s, seemed to provide a symbolic endpoint to the region's populist cycle. After the initial promise and charisma of Garcia's administration, the Peruvian debacle reinforced the view that populist mobilization and heterodox economic nationalism were followed, almost inevitably, by inflationary spirals and political upheaval. Garcia's exit from office thus coincided with the scholarly proclamation of an emerging "Washington Consensus" around an antipopulist, technocratically managed vision of political and economic liberalism (see Williamson 1990).

The much-heralded demise of populism, it turns out, was premature. Although the debt crisis of the 1980s bankrupted the nationalist, state-led development models pursued by traditional populist leaders, it also undermined the party and labor institutions that had been constructed to represent popular sectors during the era of import substitution industrialization (ISI). This deinstitutionalization of mass representation left a political void that was quickly filled, in some nations, by new personalistic leaders who cultivated a direct, unmediated relationship to unorganized mass constituencies. In response, scholars resurrected and reformulated the populist concept, highlighting its political connotations-in particular, direct leader-mass relations that bypass intermediary institutions-while downplaying its historical association with the ISI model of development. Some scholars even argued that "unexpected affinities" existed between neoliberal economic reforms, an atomized social landscape, and populist styles of political leadership (Weyland 1996; see also Roberts 1995). With the rise of Chavez at the end of the 1990s, moreover, it became clear that even more traditional statist and nationalist variants of populism retained a capacity to mobilize mass support where established party systems had been undermined by acute political and economic crises and deepening social inequalities.

Clearly, the populist concept remains subject to an uncommonly broad array of connotations, in large part because of its multidimensionality (Roberts 1995). When populism is understood first and foremost as a personalistic, unmediated mode of mass political representation, however, its relative autonomy from any given model or phase of economic development can be established, and the political correlates of its resiliency become more readily apparent. Indeed, there appears to be a dialectical relationship between the demise of traditional representative institutions and the eruption of new forms of populist leadership, whether they come attached to statist or market-oriented development policies.

The most distinctive features of this new leadership are its implacable hostility to the political establishment and an aversion to intermediary institutions that can hold a leader accountable to mass constituencies. In the Venezuelan case, Chavez proved to be a master of "the politics of antipolitics." As a former military coup leader, he was the consummate political outsider, a man of action who was untainted by the rampant corruption, political patronage, and collusive pactmaking that bred disillusionment with the post-1958 democratic regime. Chavez denounced the party leaders who dominated Venezuelan democracy, accusing them of squandering the nation's oil bonanza and draining the political system of its democratic content through their monopolization of power. These attacks both capitalized on and deepened the public antipathy toward established institutions, which, in turn, encouraged Chavez to rely on personal charisma rather than organizational bonds to consolidate mass support.