Electing Chavez: The Business of Anti-neoliberal Politics in Venezuela

3 THE ROLE OF ANTI - BUSINESS SENTIMENT

3 ◆ T H E R O L E O F A N T I - B U S I N E S S S E N T I M E N T W  Venezuelans vote to place their nation in the hands of a presidential candidate who provoked strong opposition from the business community? The reasons why Venezuelans were willing to do so are not obvious . One might naturally assume that business leaders opposed to Chávez could have dissuaded voters from supporting Chávez by convincing them that a Chávez government would severely destabilize the economy the way that Allende’s democratically elected socialist government destabilized Chile during the early s. Business leaders might also have persuaded voters that electing Chávez would provoke a political reaction that would result in the restriction of democratic freedoms, like the coup against Allende and subsequent martial law or the  coup against the first left-leaning government in Venezuela and the subsequent decade of authoritarian rule.₁ That Venezuela’s voters still supported Chávez thus poses a puzzle.  One answer to this puzzle is that Chávez specifically attracted voters who lacked confidence in business. Such voters would be indifferent to business concerns. Thus, we might expect those with lower confidence in business to be more likely to favor Chávez, even after taking into consideration other factors , such as those voter concerns identified by the three existing explanations for Chávez’s election: the corruption, failed institutions, and social polarization theses. Anti-business voters may even have been encouraged by a candidate who disturbed business. As others have demonstrated, Chávez’s supporters had “pronounced optimism” about the nation’s prospects (Weyland , ). This finding is consistent with research showing that unless economic discontent is accompanied with optimism for a specific opposition candidate, it may lower voter turnout and therefore decrease, rather than increase, the chances that opposition candidates will defeat traditional political leaders (Radcliff ). Kurt Weyland attributes this optimism among Chávez supporters to the candidate’s charisma and the generalized propensity for wishful thinking among voters faced with dire economic circumstances. But Weyland fails to specify why Chávez, more than other candidates, might have inspired this greater optimism. He writes,“It seems many citizens simply felt compelled to believe in Chávez’ charisma, independent of realistic assessments of his likely success” (Weyland , ). Perhaps Chávez inspired greater optimism so seemingly “divorced from concrete performance assessments”(Weyland , ) in part because of his antagonistic relationship with the Venezuelan business community. In making this argument, I do not dispute the evident role charisma played in Chávez’s popularity or Weyland’s interpretation that Chávez’s supporters exhibited the “exaggerated risk aversion”posited by cognitive psychological theory (Kahnemann and Tversky ) rather than the “simple materialistic” cost-benefit calculation (Weyland , ) posited by economic voting theories (Key and Cummings ; Lewis-Beck ). Nonetheless, such an interpretation still depends on a rationale for why voters pinned their hopes on Chávez as the candidate best qualified to be their“savior”(Weyland , ). The rationale I propose derives from an argument more in line with one (Stokes ) arguing that economic cost-benefit calculations are mediated by the judgments that voters make about who should be blamed for current problems.To examine this possibility, one can determine whether the optimism of voters who favored Chávez is related, at least in part, to their skepticism regarding business. In Part II. Voter Support for Chávez  other words, is the effect of an individual’s anti-business sentiment on an intention to vote for Chávez indirect, via their optimism? This study represents the first systematic test of all three leading theories and thereby advances Steve Ellner’s agenda to “prioritize the importance of sources of the discontent in order to understand why system legitimacy was questioned”(Ellner , ). Using the same national opinion poll I have employed , José Molina () identifies a number of sociodemographic changes, political identities, and opinions on campaign themes that characterized Chávez’s supporters but does not conduct a systematic test of the three leading theses on the election. Similarly, Weyland () tests leading theories of economic voting but does not test the three theories on Chávez’s election.Damarys Canache’s () analysis of this same poll helps solve the puzzle of why voters supported Chávez even though he was a...