Electing Chávez: The Business of Anti-Neoliberal Politics in Venezuela (review)

To many, Latin America has been at the center of the backlash against the neoliberal policies advocated by the leading capitalist states and multilateral institutions over the past three decades. And at the forefront of this radical shift leftwards was the election of the staunchly anti-neoliberal candidate, Hugo Chávez, to the presidency of Venezuela in 1998. But how exactly did Chávez get elected? Was he actually riding the tide of discontent against neoliberalism? Or was his victory more a reflection of the public's frustration with Venezuela's exclusive political institutions? Or was it an attempt by the electorate to rectify a long-standing history of political corruption? Leslie Gates' new book, Electing Chávez: The Business of Anti-Neoliberal Politics in Venezuela, addresses this set of questions head on, providing a richly empirical analysis of the factors underlying Chávez's 1998 victory and challenging scholars to re-focus their attention to business-state relations to explain anti-neoliberal electoral victories.

Gates begins by breaking down the question of Chávez election into two distinct puzzles: a "voter puzzle" and a "business assistance puzzle." The first asks how Chávez was able to overcome virulent opposition from Venezuela's business community to win voter support so decisively. Gates "tests" the dominant sets of explanations in the literature by analyzing national opinion polls taken just prior to the election. Here, she finds that frustrations with corruption, exclusive political institutions and increasing social polarization indeed contributed to voter dissatisfaction with the traditional political establishment. However, Chávez was not the only candidate running on a populist anti-establishment platform. What distinguished Chávez and propelled him to victory was twofold. First, he was the only anti-establishment candidate with explicitly "anti-business" politics. Second, Venezuelans had become frustrated with business leaders in particular because of a series of high profile corruption scandals that had occurred in Venezuela beginning in the 1980s and culminating with a major banking crisis in 1994. Chávez was able to garner such strong support in 1998, not necessarily because the public supported his anti-neoliberal policies or his anti-traditional establishment per se, but precisely because he triggered such strong public opposition from the very social group that the public detested the most: Venezuela's business elites.

While garnering strong support across the class spectrum in Venezuela, critical to Chávez's victory was the backing he received from a small, though financially significant section, of that very class of business elites who tended to oppose him. Answering why some business "elite outliers" supported Chávez's election campaign despite his anti-business rhetoric and policy prescriptions is the second, and more interesting, puzzle Gates addresses. In order to understand the political calculus of these elite outliers, Gates compiled a dataset of political biographies from newspapers and secondary sources, in addition to 50 interviews with economic ministers, campaign insiders, corruption and political experts, and business leaders. She then coded each entry according to their positions held, prior business experience, their relationship with existing administrations and the like. This data granted Gates the possibility of testing existing theories of business-state relations, and it is here that her empirical analysis shines the strongest. First, she found that these elite outliers neither shared Chávez's anti-neoliberal policy prescriptions nor served to benefit from his protectionist policies. Rather, their political calculus was "access-based"—driven by a desire to attain and maintain access to the state, even if and when the policies advocated by the candidates they supported ran counter to their immediate economic interests. Second, she delved deeper into the causal mechanisms underlying state-business relations through a historical analysis of the impact of the state's responses to economic crises (the 1980s debt and 1994 banking crisis) on particular firms and business leaders. It turns out that the state's responses benefitted some elites over others, which appeared...