Precarious Democracies: Understanding Regime Stability and Change in Colombia and Venezuela by Ana Maria Bejarano (review)

Bejarano’s work offers a thorough historical explanation for the rise and decline of democracy in Colombia and Venezuela. The two Andean countries experienced successful transitions to democracy almost simultaneously in 1957–1959, and here they are considered together as examples of effective elite pacts in the literature about “modes of transition.” This foundational similarity makes it difficult to understand why these two countries with parallel democratic traditions entered the twenty-first century in highly inauspicious, yet different political circumstances. Colombia became a “besieged democracy” in which civilian rule at the national level coexisted with monstrous levels of local political violence. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez established a mobilized regime that fused his personal leadership, the ruling party, and the state apparatus into an undifferentiated political machine.

To explain these divergent trajectories, Bejarano reconstructs the historical development of the state and political parties in the two nations. The main thesis of the book is that the National Front agreement that underpinned the Colombian transition in 1957–1958 was rigid and exclusive; it locked in a power-sharing agreement for the Conservative and Liberal parties for almost two decades while forcing all emerging political forces into the role of disloyal opposition. By the late 1980s, a surge in global drug trade empowered the rebel groups (and paramilitary responses), making democratic progress at the national level of little relevance in vast parts of the country where the state remained unable to enforce the rule of law.

By contrast, the agreements that secured the Venezuelan transition in 1958–1959 were more inclusive and flexible. They transcended party elites to incorporate labor and capital, they allowed for real alternation in power, and they created conditions for the reincorporation of the revolutionary left into electoral politics by 1973. At a time when military dictatorships mushroomed in Latin America, Venezuela was peaceful, democratic, and prosperous. However, a steep decline in oil prices shattered Venezuela’s prosperity by the mid 1980s. The cohesive parties that had been an asset for pact-making in the late 1950s became a liability three decades later, as their rigidity prevented adaptation and a renewal of leadership. By 1998, disgruntled middle-class and popular sectors voted massively for Hugo Chávez, taking a “leap into the unknown.”

This book exposes the simplistic elegance of many theories of democratization. Chapter 1 shows that neither coffee nor oil provides obvious structural explanations for the political trajectories of Colombia and Venezuela in the twentieth century, and that class structures become relevant only when institutions enter the narrative. Conservatives and Liberals, two elitist and factionalized political parties created in the nineteenth century, dominated Colombian politics long before the consolidation of the nation-state. By contrast, the Venezuelan state, forged by civil wars and caudillo rule, predated the emergence of modern mass parties in the 1930s (Chapter 2).

In Chapter 3, the most ambitious of the book, Bejarano recasts the theory of transitional pacts by showing that despite their apparent similarities, Colombian and Venezuelan leaders crafted very different agreements in the late 1950s. The nature of elite pacts is determined by who participates, by the restrictions imposed on the ensuing democratic process, and by the rigidity and duration of those restrictions. Parties in Colombia and Venezuela had different incentives to shape all three dimensions. As a result, the newly established democratic regimes dealt differently with the challenges posed by the army and the revolutionary left (Chapter 4), and their party systems evolved in opposite directions. Colombian parties became increasingly fragmented while Venezuelan parties became increasingly rigid (Chapter 5). Political elites were aware of the need to expand the democratic process, and several attempts took place with limited success in the 1980s and the 1990s (Chapter 6).

An uncomfortable paradox closes this story: the fragmented and elitist Colombian parties ultimately survived, while the...