week 10: clientelism, social policy and neo-populismhome.ku.edu.tr/~musomer/lecture notes/intl 450...
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Coralles and Penfold, Dragon in the Tropics:
Hugo Chavez and the Political Economy of
Revolution in Venezuela
Hybrid regimes
• Definition: «...political systems in which the mechanism for determining access to state office combines both democratic and autocratic practices.»
• In hybrid regimes, freedoms exist and the opposition is allowed to compete in elections, but the system of checks and balances becomes inoperative.
Hybrid regimes
• It exists when: – Government negotiations with opposition forces are rare.
– Die-hard loyalists of the government are placed at top-level
positions in state offices
– The state actively seeks to undermine the autonomy of civic
institutions
– The law is invoked mostly to penalize opponents but seldom
to sanction the government.
– The incumbent changes and circumvents the constitution.
– The electoral field is uneven.
Hybrid regimes
• Electoral majoritarianism of the President Hugo Chávez
– First elected in 1998.
– 12 victory in 13 elections.
– reduced accountability, limited alternation in office, expanded powers of the executive.
Hybrid regimes
• Particularity of chavismo
– heavy and unconcealed militaristic bent
– heavy statist economic policy
– distinctive foreign policy: an active commitment to balance the influence of the United States and to export a somewhat radical political ideology of statism across the region
Explanations for the rise of chavismo
• Economically:
– persistence of dependence
on oil
– government
mismanagement of the
economy
– Asian crisis of 1997
• Politically:
– decentralization (which
opened the doors)
– party fragmentation
(which cleared the path)
«Institutional resource curse» rather
than «resource curse»
• Oil, certainly, but in combination with a
number of institutional arrangements would
be able to explain Venezuelan politics.
• In particular, Chávez was able to obtain direct
political control of the state-owned national oil
company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A.
(PDVSA). – distributed oil rents to the population without any
intermediation from other political actors after 2004.
«Chavismo»
«... could be conceptualized as a political project that
seeks to undermine traditional checks and balances by
building an electoral majority based on a radical social
discourse of inclusion, glued together by property
redistribution plus vast social handouts extracted from
the oil industry.»
It is a politically illiberal project:
Electoral majority > vertical/horizontal accountability
Dahl’s criteria
• Dahl’s classic idea of liberal democracy: – high contestation
– high inclusion
• Chavismo may be deemed definitely deficient in the former and problematic in the latter criterion. – Contestation: increasingly undermined political competition
for office by placing state resources and security services at the disposal of the ruling party.
– Inclusion: mobilized new and nontraditional actors in the electoral arena (which clearly strengthens democracy), but also has deliberately excluded comparatively large segments of society, by labeling them.
• Inclusion and contestation become zero-sum games
• Electoral majority > vertical/horizontal accountability
• Exclude others in order to include newcomers
• Revolutionary discourse makes contestation also once-and-for-all
• Counterrevolutionary politics of the opposition
• In polarized societies, combative/confrontational opposition political tactics strengthen rather than weaken the ruling government
• Somer (2001): ‘’The propagation of the rival image (portrayal of identities and interests of two or more groups as zero-sum) in society.’’
Result:
- Complete erosion of checks and
balances.
- Polarization between chavistas and their
detractors.
How Venezuela became a hybrid
regime?
Elite choices = preferences of elected politicians, based on their own ideologies and
their misreading of the preferences of certain constituencies
... in combination with ...
Political opportunities = chiefly the presence of economic resources at the disposal of the state, together with institutions of representation that were weak to begin with
and were further weakened by deliberate state policies.
6 Acts
• Act I: Creating a Hyperpresidential
Constitution – Chavez convinced people that the existing political system
was corrupt and promised to change it radically.
– Changed immediately rules of the game through referandum:
end of the «partyarchy».
– Managed to gain overwhelming control of the Constituent
Assembly.
– Achieved control of the CNE, the electoral monitoring body.
– Formidable expansion of presidential powers. Checks and
balances eroded. Exclusion of opponents.
6 Acts
• Act II: Polarize and
punish – Demonstrations organized by the
opposition groups concerned by
Chavez’s authoritarian tendencies
in 2001 and 2002.
– Defections from the government.
– Attempt of coup d’Etat led by Carmona in 2002. Gave way to a more polarized society and ultimately consolidated Chavez’s power.
– Strike led by quasi-autonomous PDVSA (state-owned oil company). Economic depression followed by a punitive policy by Chavez.
6 Acts
• Act II: Polarize and punish – Despite institutional barriers, opposition managed to collect
enough signatures for a referandum to remove Chavez from
office in 2004.
– Chavez was extremely unpopular at that time. But he came
up with a new strategy: vintage clientelism.
6 Acts
• Act III: Spend and Deflate – Chavez took advantage of suddenly rising oil revenue to launch a
set of social programs described by him as “missions to save the
people.”
– Rise in the popularity of the president and victory in the
referandum in 2004.
– He succeeded in taking control of twenty-one out of twenty-three
state governorships, and more than 90 percent of municipalities in
2004.
– Packed the Supreme Court.
– Harrassment of those who signed the petition against Chavez.
– Boycott of the Nationaly Assembly elections in 2005 by the
opposition. Chavez’s total control over the legislature.
6 Acts
• Act IV: The 2006 Presidential Election and
the Opposition’s Dilemmas – Opposition split into three camps:
• 1) those who believed in a belligerent strategy
• 2) those who preferred to abstain electorally
• 3) those who preferred to follow constitutional rules, despite the
flimsy guarantees of fairness.
– Chavez made partial reforms to further divide opposition:
An important strategic tool usually used in hybrid regimes.
– Most of the opposition parties decided to play the game
despite unfair competition.
6 Acts
• Act V: Misreading the 2006 Presidential
Election – President Chávez won reelection for a six-year term with
62.9 percent of the vote, compared to the opposition’s 36.9
percent in 2006.
– Chavez misread the results: people who voted for him
viewed his reelection as an expression of approval of the
status quo rather than as a call for more radical changes.
6 Acts
• Act VI: The Government Radicalizes while
the Opposition Moderates – From 2002 to 2004: simultaneous radicalization of both
government and oppostion.
– From 2006 onwards: radicalization of government despite
the moderation of the opposition.
• «Nothing can stop the revolution!» (Chavez, 2006).
• Banned a media company.
• Proposed new constitutional amandments.
– Public demonstrations. Chávez dismissed the student
movement as “elitist” and encouraged chavista supporters to
counterprotest, leading to a few violent clashes.
6 Acts
• Act VI: The Government Radicalizes while
the Opposition Moderates – New referandum in 2007 in order to eliminate term limits for
presidents and to limit private property.
• First defeat of Chavez!
– New tool to intimidate opposition in the elections of 2008:
corruption probes against opposition candidates.
• First fruits for the opposition’s decision to play the game.
– In 2009, the government began to target elected officials
from the opposition. Also introduced a new electoral law
that essentially gerrymandered districts.
6 Acts
• Act VII: The End of Term Limits – Success in the 2009 referandum which ended term limits for
presidency.
– End of almost all checks and balances.
– Venezuela turned into the most hyperpresidential hybrid
political system in the region.
HOW?
• 4 types of social spending: – Underfunding
• refers to situations where governments fail to provide sufficient funds for
a given social program.
– Cronyism
• refers to social outlays that are, in fact, concealed direct subsidies to
elites, mostly “friends” and “family,” in both literal and figurative senses.
– Clientelism
• refers to spending that, unlike cronyism, is directed toward non-elites, but
is nonetheless still offered conditionally: the state expects some kind of
political favor back from the grantee.
– Pro-poor spending
• occurs when aid is offered on the basis of genuine economic need with
no strings attached—without political expectations of the grantee.
HOW?
• Two conditions increasing pro-poor social
spending: – Political competition
– Institutional accountability (best safeguard against
clientelism).
HOW?
• In Venezuela: – First stage (1999–2003): Transition from high to low
accountability. Underfunding social spending.
– Second stage (2003-8): Increase in the political competition.
Clientelism increased.
– Overall evaluation of Chavez’s policies: Clientelism and
poverty spending interacted closely.
– An example of state resources undermining democratic
practices by creating an uneven playing field between the
incumbent and opponents.
HOW?
• In Venezuela: – The chavista regime also relied on a less tangible but equally
powerful strategy to sustain its electoral coalition: offering
supporters impunity to engage in corruption and job
discrimination.
– Image of a watchful government: «We know for whom you
voted for!» Increased the cost of opposing government.
Social programs
• In the case of developing countries, regime
type (democracy vs. non-democracy) fails to
account for differences in the origin of social
programs. – overwhelming number of social insurance programs were
initially adopted by nondemocratic governments in the Third
World.
Social programs
Possible strategies of an autocrat (political logic)
1. Terror, torture and purges
• If it succeeds, unconstrained power.
• Efforts to expropriate all economic returns by the
ruler and lack of investment.
• Economic depression
2. Collusion
• Efforts to prevent coups by providing leaders of the
launching organization with a stream of rents in selected
economic sectors
• Restricting economic competivity.
Social programs
Possible strategies of an autocrat (political logic)
3. Organizational proliferation.
• the dictator encourages the creation of
competing organizations in order to raise the
costs of collective action by the launching
organization.
Social programs
• Economic (structural) logic rather than political? – Focus on 4 structural variables:
• domestic market size
• relative abundance or scarcity of labor
• asset inequality
• the openness of the international economy
1. Redistributive social security insurance
Large domestic markets
Scarce labor
High inequality
Import-substitution industrialization
2. Human capital development
Large domestic markets
Abundant labor
Low inequality
Export-led industrialization
3. Mix of the two
Large domestic markets
Abundant labor
High inequality
Import-substitution
industrialization