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C h A P t e r S e V e n The Misiones of the Chávez Government Kirk A. Hawkins, Guillermo Rosas, and Michael E. Johnson The goal of several contributors to this volume is to determine whether Chavismo and the Bolivarian Revolution are capable of creating the kind of participatory democracy the movement advocates or if instead there is some reversion to traditional forms of clientelism and top-down control. Each of these contributors affirms that the answer to this question is not an exclusive choice but is instead a matter of degree and variability. For example, they show that in many regards the movement’s programs and organizations (community media, Urban Land Committees, neighborhood associations, and so on) demonstrate autonomy, but that in other areas these programs and organizations have the potential for and sometimes show signs of submitting to party bosses and Chávez himself. They also show that the strength of local identities differs across and within organizations and across time, and that financial incentives are increasingly present but vary considerably in their size and effect. In this chapter we also consider this question by engaging in an analysis of the misiones, or social programs of the Chávez government. However, we hope to further problematize the analysis by showing that understanding Chavismo —or more particularly, the movement since the approval of the 1999 Constitution and the abortive coup of 2002—is not a matter of a single dimension , however continuous the scale. Rather, we must take into account the possibility of an additional mode of citizen-politician linkage, one with a problematic relationship to the principles of participatory democracy. Specifically, we refer to charismatic linkages with a populist discourse. As we will see in the case of the misiones, the Bolivarian Revolution often cannot be characterized as either programmatic (a concept we define below) or clientelistic but must instead be treated as charismatic. As with a clientelistic mode of linkage, the movement manifests a strong top-down quality in the re- MISIoneS oF the ChÁVez GoVernMent 187 lationship between citizens and politicians; but in this instance the relationship arises from a powerful belief in the ability of the leader to provide transcendence and moral-political renewal, and not merely from perceived material benefits. The movement is also populist in the sense that it relies on a Manichaean discourse of a collective, popular will pitted against a conspiratorial elite (and not because of any claims that economic policies are unsustainable or that the political leadership is insincere, as we will clarify below). This discourse gives rise to other phenomena that are widely commented on nowadays in Venezuela, such as extreme polarization and the use of partisan criteria in the distribution of government goods and services. In this regard too there is a resemblance to clientelism, but with an important qualitative difference— the criteria to receive goods and services are rarely explicit, let alone understood by beneficiaries. Along this charismatic-populist dimension too there are varying degrees, not stark categories, and we reaffirm what we insist are the impressive accomplishments of the misiones, as well as the stated vision that motivates them. But we insist that Chavismo cannot be understood without introducing this third mode of citizen-politician linkages. In what follows, we present some of the findings from our study of the misiones , carried out primarily during June and July 2005 and consisting of interviews with ministerial officials, an on-site survey of approximately 140 aid recipients and workers, and a statistical analysis of program allocations in three of the misiones. The situation in Venezuela is constantly evolving, and some of the data provided here are now out of date. However, we feel that our analysis provides an important snapshot of the Bolivarian Revolution at a moment of great popularity and strength. Basic Concepts As originally developed by anthropologists and subsequently by political scientists, clientelism was seen as a relationship of dyadic, unequal exchange, usually accompanied by some kind of patrimonial values system (for a recent restatement of this conceptualization by a political scientist, see Mainwaring 1999, chapter 9). According to this view, clientelism naturally resulted in a top-down relationship or a lack of capacity for autonomous action, the latter being the hallmark of civil society, or our associational life outside of the family and the state. For both classical liberal and radical participatory theorists of democracy, an autonomous civil society is ultimately necessary for full and effective democracy (for the classical...

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