The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in Venezuela (review)

Like any edited volume, this recent compilation by two distinguished scholars of Venezuelan politics confronts two challenges: to engage in a descriptive exercise that will remain timeless and relevant, and to synthesize each author's contributions in a way that adds to our stock of knowledge. The challenges are much greater here, because the scene in Venezuela changes constantly, and because the authors confront a large literature that offers a multitude of theories for the "unraveling" of Venezuela's representative democracy. Fortunately, the book overcomes these descriptive challenges and presents a very useful midterm assessment of Chavismo, an assessment that moves beyond the simple observation that representative democracy in Venezuela has decayed and shows how Venezuela has shifted from one type of hybrid democracy to another.

Unfortunately, the book is not quite as successful at its synthesis and development of a new theory for such shifts in regime types. The authors provide a comprehensive argument rooted in an extensive literature review. The argument strongly emphasizes the unexpected side-effects of formal political institutions chosen under the Punto Fijo regime, but the resulting theory is very complex and seems less convincing than older, structural explanations focusing on political economy. After describing their empirical contributions, I will address their theory, referring along the way to the work of their contributors.

McCoy and Myers's descriptive claim represents an effort at categorizing regimes. They argue that Venezuela has shifted from one kind of hybrid or "gray zone" democracy to another; specifically, from Carothers's (2002) "feckless democracy" under the Punto Fijo regime (1958–98) to a "dominant power system" under Chávez's Fifth Republic. This effort is nicely understated and nicely accomplished. Each chapter provides helpful, confirming evidence of this depiction, which the editors convincingly summarize in their opening and concluding chapters.

José Molina's chapter, for example, describes the changes that have taken place in the party system since 1958, showing that the party system did not really become institutionalized until the early 1970s and that the post-1998 system revolves around the figure of Chávez and his movement without having reconsolidated itself. Rafael de la Cruz describes the program of decentralization that the traditional elites adopted in order to relegitimate the regime and talks briefly about how the Chávez government has undone those reforms. Luis Salamanca provides an intellectually compelling account of the growth in civil society and its contradictions in Venezuela, as well as Chávez's attempts to render this civil society less autonomous. Richard Hillman provides an insightful intellectual history of Venezuela in the latter half of the twentieth century that highlights the growing criticisms of the Punto Fijo regime but also the inability to forge a new elite consensus.

These and other contributors (Damarys Canache on the urban poor, Harold Trinkunas on the military, Nelson Ortiz on business entrepreneurs, Carlos Romero on U.S.-Venezuelan relations, Janet Kelly and Pedro Palma on macroeconomic policy, and José Antonio Gil Yepes on public opinion) highlight the inadequacies of the previous regime, the consequences of those inadequacies, and the failure of the new Chávez government to provide any real solution to Venezuela's underlying problems. While Chávez clearly represents something new, the prevailing feeling is that the errors of the past are being repeated and aggravated. I suspect that the book will be frequently cited for this descriptive claim.

The volume's theoretical claim is not as elegant or convincing. McCoy and Myers argue in the introduction and conclusion that the breakdown of Venezuela's democracy—its shift from "feckless democracy" to a "dominant power system"—is the product of three general causal mechanisms: structural, institutional, and cultural. By structural, they mean political economy; specifically, Venezuela's dependence on oil, with all its negative consequences: price and revenue volatility and its damage to investor expectations, creation of false popular expectations of wealth, underdevelopment of the state's...