Week 10: Clientelism, Social Policy and

Neo-Populism

INTL 450

Murat Somer © 2016

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.

Mares and Carnes, «Social Policy in Developing

Countries»

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

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

Social programs

• Two broad policy changes during recent

decades: – the privatization of pensions

– the introduction of universalistic health insurance.