Social Cowelates of Party System Demise

and Populist Resurgence in Veneuela

Kenneth M. Roberts

ABSTRACT
Considering its strong, highly institutionalized two-party system,
Venezuela was surely one of the least likely countries in Latin Amer-
ica to experience a party system breakdown and populist resur-
gence. That traditional party system nevertheless was founded on a
mixture of corporatist and clientelist linkages to social actors that
were unable to withstand the secular decline of the oil economy
and several aborted attempts at market liberalization. Successive
administrations led by the dominant parties failed to reverse the
economic slide, with devastating consequences for the party system
as a whole. The party system ultimately rested on insecure struc-
tural foundations; and when its social moorings crumbled in the
1990s, the populist movement of Hugo Chavez emerged to fill the
political void. This populist resurgence both capitalized on and
accelerated the institutional decomposition of the old order.

T he landslide election of Hugo Chiivez to the presidency of Venezuela

in 1998 provided perhaps the most clear-cut evidence yet of the
enduring vitality of populism in contemporary Latin American politics. A
short decade earlier, populism-conventionally understood as a form of
personalistic leadership that mobilized diverse popular constituencies
behind statist, nationalistic, and redistributive development models-had
been considered all but extinct in the region. A variety of scholars had
written its epitaph or extolled its demise, consigning populism to an ear-
lier stage of historical development (Drake 1982) or condemning its asso-
ciation with economic instability (Dornbusch and Edwards 1991).
The crisis-ridden denouement of Alan Garcia’s ill-fated government
in Peru, arguably the most ambitious populist experiment of the 1980s,
seemed to provide a symbolic endpoint to the region’s populist cycle.
After the initial promise and charisma of Garcia’s administration, the
Peruvian debacle reinforced the view that populist mobilization and het-
erodox economic nationalism were followed, almost inevitably, by infla-
tionary spirals and political upheaval. Garcia’s exit from office thus coin-
cided with the scholarly proclamation of an emerging “Washington
Consensus” around an antipopulist, technocratically managed vision of
political and economic liberalism (see Williamson 1990).
The much-heralded demise of populism, it turns out, was premature.
Although the debt crisis of the 1980s bankrupted the nationalist, state-led

35
36 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 45: 3

development models pursued by traditional populist leaders, it also

undermined the party and labor institutions that had been constructed to
represent popular sectors during the era of import substitution industri-
alization (ISI). This deinstitutionalization of mass representation left a
political void that was quickly filled, in some nations, by new personal-
istic leaders who cultivated a direct, unmediated relationship to unor-
ganized mass constituencies. In response, scholars resurrected and refor-
mulated the populist concept, highlighting its political connotations-in
particular, direct leader-mass relations that bypass intermediary institu-
tions-while downplaying its historical association with the IS1 model of
development. Some scholars even argued that “unexpected affinities”
existed between neoliberal economic reforms, an atomized social land-
scape, and populist styles of political leadership (Weyland 1996; see also
Roberts 1995).With the rise of ChAvez at the end of the 1990s, moreover,
it became clear that even more traditional statist and nationalist variants
of populism retained a capacity to mobilize mass support where estab-
lished party systems had been undermined by acute political and eco-
nomic crises and deepening social inequalities.
Clearly, the populist concept remains subject to an uncommonly
broad array of connotations, in large part because of its multidimen-
sionality (Roberts 1995). When populism is understood first and fore-
most as a personalistic, unmediated mode of mass political representa-
tion, however, its relative autonomy from any given model or phase of
economic development can be established, and the political correlates
of its resiliency become more readily apparent. Indeed, there appears to
be a dialectical relationship between the demise of traditional represen-
tative institutions and the eruption of new forms of populist leadership,
whether they come attached to statist or market-oriented development
policies.
The most distinctive features of this new leadership are its implaca-
ble hostility to the political establishment and an aversion to intermedi-
ary institutions that can hold a leader accountable to mass constituen-
cies. In the Venezuelan case, ChAvez proved to be a master of “the
politics of antipolitics.” As a former military coup leader, he was the
consummate political outsider, a man of action who was untainted by
the rampant corruption, political patronage, and collusive pactmaking
that bred disillusionment with the post-1958 democratic regime. Ch5vez
denounced the party leaders who dominated Venezuelan democracy,
accusing them of squandering the nation’s oil bonanza and draining the
political system of its democratic content through their monopolization
of power. These attacks both capitalized on and deepened the public
antipathy toward established institutions, which, in turn, encouraged
Chiivez to rely on personal charisma rather than organizational bonds to
consolidate mass support.
 ROBERTS: VENEZUELA’S PARTIES 37

What are the conditions under which such a populist strategy can
tap a responsive chord in a nation with a long democratic tradition and
a highly institutionalized party system? Populism is clearly a durable and
adaptable political phenomenon in Latin America, one that is capable of
emerging in diverse and unexpected contexts. It arises most forcefully,
however, in periods of political and economic crisis or transition, when
established patterns of representation are strained or breaking down,
and new ones have yet to be consolidated. In such contexts, traditional
representative institutions may lose their capacity to appeal to large sec-
tors of the populace, or they may be eclipsed by the mobilization of
new groups by emerging leaders or political movements.
Not surprisingly, then, there have been two primary periods of pop-
ulist upheaval in the political development of Latin America. The first
period coincided with the demise of oligarchic sociopolitical orders and
the onset of mass politics after the 1920s and 1930s, when urbanization
and industrialization transformed the social landscape. The rapidly
growing urban middle and working classes were not easily absorbed
into the rural-based patron-client networks of traditional oligarchic par-
ties, and in much of the region they were available for mobilization by
populist figures-including Juan Peron, GetQlio Vargas, Liizaro Carde-
nas, and Victor RaQl Haya d e la To rre-o r new populist parties that
advocated grassroots organization, social reform, and nationalistic IS1
policies (see Conniff 1982).
Accion Democriitica (AD) was one of the most prominent of these
new parties, and its emergence in the 1940s fundamentally transformed
the elitist and authoritarian character of Venezuelan politics. New lines
of political cleavage were drawn, and a magnum leap occurred in the
levels of both social and political organization. AD built the first-ever
mass political party in Venezuela, and its social outreach efforts recon-
figured Venezuelan civil society, endowing the party with organic ties to
mass labor and peasant associations. For nearly half a century, these
sociopolitical bonds helped weave the fabric of a political system whose
central cleavage pitted a mass-based, labor-mobilizing party against its
more conservative arch-rival, the Christian Democratic COPE1 (Comiti.
de Organizaci6n Politica Electoral Independiente).
A second period of populist upheaval was initiated across much of
Latin America, however, when the “state-centric matrix” (Cavarozzi
1994) left behind by the first phase of populism began to decompose in
the 1980s. Despite their personalistic leadership patterns, the first wave
of populist movements eventually constructed an institutional edi-
fice-including mass-based party organizations, powerful trade union
movements, and state corporatist modes of interest intermediation-that
was deeply imbedded in the IS1 model of development and the oppor-
tunities it provided to mobilize political support around varied forms of
38 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 45: 3

state intervention or patronage distributions. When this development

model collapsed in the 1980s, it struck a severe blow to the representa-
tive institutions that had grown up alongside it. Labor movements were
decimated by economic crises and structural adjustment policies; their
corporatist linkages to states and parties were shredded by market
reforms and economic austerity; and populist parties were shaken by
the loss of their development strategies, the disarticulation of their social
bases, and the political costs associated with crisis management. The net
result was a fragmented social landscape and a more independent,
detached electorate that was less bound to traditional parties and thus
more fluid in its electoral behavior.
This context was tailor-made for the eruption of new expressions of
populist leadership that appealed directly to the masses while bypass-
ing representative institutions. With traditional parties in decline, dis-
credited by corruption scandals and economic mismanagement, inde-
pendents and political outsiders could easily mobilize popular support
by adopting an antiestablishment line. Some of these challengers were
new to the national political stage, such as Albert0 Fujimori in Peru,
whereas others were familiar to the body politic in one form or another,
such as Fernando Collor de Mello in Brazil and Rafael Caldera and Hugo
Chhvez in Venezuela. All, however, eschewed party organization and
formed independent movements to represent el pueblo against the par-
tisan establishment, and they often clashed with labor movements and
other interest groups that were affiliated with the old order. Although
the economic policies adopted by these leaders were markedly differ-
ent, the similarities in their political logic were striking.
This populist resurgence was especially astonishing in Venezuela,
given the strength of the established institutions that had to be displaced
to create political space for new populist figures. Indeed, for most of the
1980s,as other Latin American nations were struggling to establish or con-
solidate democratic regimes and rebuild party systems following periods
of authoritarian repression, Venezuela surely would have been considered
a “least likely case” for a regime-threatening party system breakdown and
populist resurgence. The Venezuelan case is therefore highly instructive
for theoretical and comparative purposes; causal factors that are strong
enough to undermine even the most highly institutionalized of party sys-
tems are likely to exert more general effects throughout the region.
What, then, explains the surprising breakdown of Venezuela’s party
system and the populist resurgence that it spawned? This article argues
that these unexpected outcomes are best understood through an analy-
sis of the social bases of political representation in Venezuela and how
they were eroded by the prolonged crisis and demise of the state-cen-
tered matrix of development. Venezuela’s powerful representative insti-
tutions were founded on a mixture of corporatist and clientelist linkages
 ROBERTS: VENEZUELA’S PARTIES 39

to social actors that were unable to withstand the secular decline of the
oil economy and several aborted attempts at market liberalization. Suc-
cessive administrations led by the dominant parties failed to reverse the
economic slide, with devastating consequences for the party system as
a whole. The party system ultimately rested on insecure structural foun-
dations, and when its social moorings foundered in the 1980s, the insti-
tutional edifice of the old order began to crumble. As Chavismo filled
the political void, it both capitalized o n and accelerated the institutional
decomposition of the old order.

THEPUZZLE
OF PARTY DECAY
SYSTEM
IN VENEfllELA
The decomposition of the Venezuelan party system in the 1990s poses
a significant challenge to the scholarship o n political institutions and
representation. In a region notorious for the shallow institutional devel-
opment and ephemeral character of its political parties, Venezuela was
thought to be different. The post-1958 democratic regime was anchored
by two dominant parties that were electorally stable, internally disci-
plined, and deeply embedded in civil society. AD and COPE1 were hier-
archically and bureaucratically structured parties, and their organiza-
tional tentacles penetrated every nook and cranny of Venezuelan
society, generating powerful political loyalties and cohesive collective
identities. A far cry from the patrimonial networks and personalistic
vehicles that masqueraded as political parties in many other Latin Amer-
ican nations, Venezuela’s party organizations were formidable govern-
ing institutions that were built to last. Their demise therefore raises
unsettling questions about the sustainability of representative institu-
tions in modern Latin American democracies.
To be fully understood, the Venezuelan case needs to be viewed
from a comparative perspective that includes the interaction between
representative institutions, their social constituencies, and the evolving
structural context in which parties try to mobilize support. The crisis of
IS1 and the shift to neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s were a turning
point in Latin America’s political development, as they shredded the
social bonds that many traditional parties had relied on and created a
new socioeconomic matrix for political representation. Although some
traditional party systems survived and adapted to the new social land-
scape, the period of transition proved to be especially traumatic and
politically disruptive in the Venezuelan case. By the end of the 1990s,
when Hugo Chhvez and his upstart Movimiento Quinta Republica
(MVR) had swept to a series of electoral victories, not only the party
system but the entire constitutional order of the post-1958 democratic
regime had decomposed in Venezuela.
40 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 45: 3

The demise of the Venezuelan party system is hardly unique in the

Latin American region. Traditional party systems have also been eclipsed
in Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil over the past 20 years, while many other
nations have experienced high levels of electoral volatility or major elec-
toral realignments. In other cases of party system decomposition, how-
ever, traditional party organizations were generally noted for their debil-
ity; what is distinctive about the Venezuelan case is the fortitude of the
institutions that decomposed. This decomposition could hardly be more
at odds with the general thrust of contemporary research on political
institutions. Scholars have devoted considerable attention to explaining
how institutions are generated, how they structure and stabilize political
behavior (Lijphart and Waisman 1996; March and Olson 1989; Shugart
and Carey 19921, and how they adapt to changes in their external envi-
ronment (Kitschelt 1994; Mair 1997; North 1990). Among Latin Ameri-
canists, the institutionalization of party systems is often considered vital
for the consolidation and healthy functioning of democratic regimes
(Mainwaring and Scully 1995). Theorizing about the causes and process
of institutional breakdown, however, remains at a rudimentary stage,
despite its obvious relevance for the contemporary political scene
(Remmer 1997, 52-53). In short, a great deal is known about how insti-
tutions emerge, evolve, and shape political behavior, but the tendency to
associate institutions with fixed relationships, standard operating proce-
dures, and the rule-based reproduction of patterned behavior leaves their
potential for decay shrouded in mystery.
The valuable work of Mainwaring and Scully (1995) o n party sys-
tems, for example, places the primary emphasis on institution building
rather than institutional decay. The authors recognize that institutional-
ization “isneither unilinear nor irreversible” (1995, 211, and they identify
a number of factors that can erode established party systems. Neverthe-
less, their main concern is the inchoate nature of party systems in much
of Latin America, which they associate with political instability, ineffec-
tive legislating and policymaking, populist and patrimonial practices, and
underrepresentation of popular sectors in the political process (see also
Mainwaring 1999). The construction of more institutionalized party sys-
tems is thus understood to be a primary challenge for effective demo-
cratic governance, and even after the political turmoil of the late 1980s
and early 1990s Venezuela ranked very high o n Mainwaring and Scully’s
index of party system institutionalization (1995, 17). In their eyes,
Venezuelan parties had stable electoral constituencies, solid roots in civil
society, legitimate political functions, and strong internal organizations.
Once established, such parties are not expected to collapse. In their
seminal study of partisan cleavage patterns, Lipset and Rokkan (1967)
assert that the social cleavages structuring electoral competition at the
onset of universal suffrage tend to become frozen in place, encouraging
 ROBERTS: VENEZUELA’S PARTIES 41

party system stability. Similarly, but from a more micro level of analysis,
Converse (1969, 139) claims that once party institutions survive the ini-
tial threats that accompany their founding, they are expected to “accu-
mulate a deepening stability with the passage of time” through
processes of habituation, socialization, and political learning. Although
the political turmoil of the 1960s, the emergence of new social move-
ments, and the social changes that accompanied the rise of postindus-
trial society spawned a flurry of studies o n electoral realignment and
party system change in advanced industrial democracies (Crewe and
Denver 1985; Inglehart 1990; Dalton et al. 1984), established party sys-
tems and their underlying cleavage structures proved to be highly
resilient (Bartolini and Mair 1990). And even if social and economic
changes or political crises induce electoral realignments or the weaken-
ing of traditional parties, it hardly follows that highly institutionalized
party organizations will simply collapse as serious political competitors.
Dominant theoretical perspectives thus provided little reason to
anticipate the decomposition of Venezuela’s formidable party institu-
tions. As Converse declares, “the timing o f . . . terminal events, embed-
ded as they will be in a complex nexus of change, seems almost impos-
sible to forecast” (1969, 139). Nevertheless, political scientists love a n
empirical anomaly, and the Venezuelan case has spawned a range of
efforts to interpret and explain its apparent singularity. Indeed, all four
of the main contending theoretical approaches to the study of contem-
porary comparative politics-institutionalism, structuralism, rational
choice, and political culture-have generated interpretations of the
crisis, if not necessarily the demise, of the Venezuelan party system.
These four approaches have focused attention on two critical variables
in the development of the Venezuelan crisis: the design of political insti-
tutions, and the impact of oil on the country’s economic development,
political culture, and patterns of political representation.
Institutional explanations have attributed the crisis to the character-
istics of Venezuelan political institutions, both at the level of the politi-
cal regime and at the level of party organizations. The important study
by Coppedge (19941, for example, suggests that the overinstitutional-
ization of a party system may be as problematic as the underinstitution-
alization stressed by Mainwaring and Scully. According to Coppedge,
Venezuela’s hierarchically controlled, bureaucratically organized parties
so thoroughly dominated electoral campaigns, legislative proceedings,
and civic organizations that they destabilized democracy and generated
disillusionment by “blocking off most of the informal channels through
which citizens voice their demands” (1994, 158). When combined with
presidentialism at the regime level, this partidocracia undermined dem-
ocratic accountability and flexibility while encouraging unprincipled
political factionalism within the parties. Corrales (2000, 136-38) and Lev-
42 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 45:3

itsky (2001, 50-51) concur that the “cartelization” and bureaucratic rou-
tinization of the AD directorate created organizational rigidities that
impeded the adoption of economic reforms.
In a related vein, Crisp (2000) argues that the electoral and consul-
tative arrangements established during Venezuela’s democratic transition
in 1958 produced political stability, but at the price of institutional rigidi-
ties that culminated in crisis by blocking adaptation to a changing social
and economic context. Dominant parties and interest groups thus
“became a frozen status quo,” with institutional safeguards that allowed
them to “control policymaking, exclude new groups from participating,
and keep new issues off the agenda indefinitely” (2000, 173). Efforts to
reform these institutions in the midst of crisis failed to reinvigorate them,
and may have even hastened their demise. Explanations drawing on
rational choice and game theoretic models of political behavior have
argued that post-1989 decentralizing reforms weakened AD and COPE1
by lowering barriers to the entry of new parties and encouraging polit-
ical entrepreneurs to abandon or assert their autonomy from traditional
parties (Benton 1997; Penfold Becerra 2000).
A second variable that has been stressed by scholars working from
a variety of theoretical perspectives is the political and economic
impact of oil. This emphasis is most explicit in the structural approach
of Karl (1997), who argues that developing states and their affiliated
modes of political representation are heavily shaped and constrained
by their dominant export commodities and strategies for revenue
extraction. According to Karl, the availability of extraordinary (yet
undependable) oil revenues engendered a highly interventionist but
grossly inefficient state, erratic economic performance, and a patron-
age-ridden party system that entered into crisis as it progressively lost
its capacity to provide public services and distribute benefits to a broad
range of clients. Likewise, political culture approaches have empha-
sized the role of oil in creating a “rentier mentality” among Venezuelan
citizens, who supported democracy o n purely instrumental grounds
and thus turned against democratic institutions when they failed to
deliver the mythological bounty from the nation’s oil wealth (Romero
1997). According to Romero, the illusion of affluence encouraged dem-
agoguery and “pathological learning” among political elites, along with
a popular aversion to economic reforms that could have addressed the
nation’s deepening crisis.
Even institutional and rational choice approaches have acknowl-
edged the structural importance of oil revenues, which fueled the polit-
ical pacts (Penfold Becerra 20001, patronage distributions (Benton
1997), and semicorporatist consultative mechanisms (Crisp 2000) that
upheld Venezuela’s democratic regime. The decline in oil revenues in
the 1980s and 1990s thus undermined the material foundations by
 ROBERTS: VENEZUELA’S PARTIES 43

which Venezuelan democracy had generated support and conciliated

interests (Kornblith 1998).
These works have contributed greatly to theoretical understanding
of the Venezuelan experience, and there is no denying the centrality of
the oil-institutions nexus in the genesis and evolution of the nation’s
multilayered crisis. Too often, however, the literature o n Venezuela
leaves the impression that the nation is a political outlier, a singular case
with an exceptional, sui generis trajectory of economic and political
development. Romero, for example, defends the notion of Venezuelan
exceptionalism by claiming that the availability of oil rents to facilitate
political compromise created a deeply flawed, “country-specific”
process of democratic development (1997, 9). Other works are more
careful to locate Venezuela within a comparative theoretical framework,
but nonetheless emphasize the nation’s extreme characteristics. This can
be seen in Coppedge’s assertion that “there is no other pluralistic system
in which parties control so many aspects of the democratic process so
completely,” making Venezuela “probably the most extreme case of a
pathological kind of political control” known as partyarchy (1994, 2).
Likewise, Karl sees Venezuela as the one full-fledged “petrostate” in the
Latin American region, which helps to explain why it developed a “per-
manent predominance of the public sector matched in Latin America
only by Socialist Cuba” (1997, 90).
Venezuela’s post-1958 political order certainly boasted a number of
distinctive attributes that contributed to the crisis and decomposition of
its party system, but these should not be allowed to obscure the com-
monalities the nation shares with others in Latin America. The main dis-
tinctions that did exist reflected differences of degree rather than differ-
ences of kind, and the challenges Venezuela confronted during the shift
from IS1 to neoliberalism were comparable to those of its neighbors. For
this reason, there may be significant theoretical payoffs in locating the
Venezuelan experience in a regionwide comparative framework for ana-
lyzing the relationship between socioeconomic and political change.

CORPORATISM, CLIENTELISM, AND

Pm~W3oc1~m
LINKAGES
To understand why a seemingly stable party system rapidly decomposes,
it is necessary to explore the bonds that link parties to their social con-
stituencies and to analyze how the bonds become eroded or severed at
particular political conjunctures. Venezuela’s dominant political parties
may have been more highly developed in their bureaucratic organization
than their counterparts in most other Latin American countries, but they
did not differ significantly in the nature of their societal bonds. These
societal bonds were forged during the IS1 era of state-led development,
44 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 45:3

and they were severely strained by the crisis of IS1 and the shift (how-
ever incomplete in the Venezuelan case) toward market liberalism, with
its emphasis on economic austerity and diminished state intervention.
Historically, parties in Latin America have relied on two principal
modes of societal linkage to mobilize constituency support. Patron-
clientelism, which entails an exchange of material benefits for political
support, is a nearly universal linkage mechanism in Latin American
party systems. Vertical patronage networks managed by political brokers
link individual clients to a party machine by means of discretionary and
selective distribution of political favors, public employment and serv-
ices, and government contracts or subsidies. Patron-clientelism was the
primary linkage mechanism in nineteenth-century oligarchic party sys-
tems, and it was frequently used by both elite and mass-based parties
to mobilize lower-class electoral support following the onset of mass
politics in the twentieth century.
In contrast, the second main linkage mechanism, corporatist or
“encapsulating” bonds, was a creation of the IS1 era and the mass polit-
ical participation it unleashed. These bonds were less universal than
clientelism, as they developed in some Latin American party systems but
not in others. Although corporatist bonds may also entail a n exchange
of material benefits for political support, they differ from clientelism in
their organizational basis: they are collective rather than individual in
nature. That is, corporatist bonds are established between parties and
group constituencies that are organized outside the partisan arena, such
as labor and peasant confederations, giving parties a horizontally organ-
ized, grassroots base of mass support that purely clientelistic machine
parties generally lack (see Kaufman 1977).
A basic differentiating feature of Latin American party systems was
whether they developed encapsulating corporatist bonds during the
IS1 era to complement clientelism, or whether they relied more exclu-
sively on the latter. In some Latin American nations, most notably
Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and
Venezuela, party systems were reconfigured during the IS1 era by the
rise of a mass-based, labor-mobilizing populist or leftist party with
encapsulating linkages to lower-class constituencies. In these nations,
parties were linked to society through a combination of corporatist
and clientelist bonds, and a central political cleavage typically devel-
oped between the labor-mobilizing party (or parties) and conservative
defenders of the socioeconomic and political status quo. In other
nations, however-namely Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican
Republic, Ecuador, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Uruguay-either
traditional oligarchic parties remained electorally dominant throughout
the IS1 era, or new elite or personality-based parties emerged that pro-
vided little impetus for social mobilization. Party systems in these
 ROBERTS: VENEZUELA'S PARTIES 45

nations continued to rely overwhelmingly on clientelistic rather than

corporatist bonds.
Nations that developed a strong labor-mobilizing party and a com-
bination of corporatist and clientelist linkage mechanisms shared a
number of other characteristics. Unionization levels were much higher
in these nations as labor movements were invigorated by intensive IS1
strategies (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela), strategic
mining or extractive industries (Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and
Venezuela), periods of leftist or revolutionary government (Bolivia,
Chile, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru), or some combination of these fac-
tors. All these nations adopted extensive forms of state economic inter-
vention before the onset of the debt crisis in the 1980s, and all suffered
severe economic crises during the transition from IS1 to neoliberalism.
Indeed, all the hyperinflationary cycles that plagued Latin America
between the 1970s and 1990s occurred in this set of cases.
Venezuela, like Mexico, managed to avoid hyperinflation partly
because labor demands and distributive conflicts were tempered by the
close historical ties between the dominant party and organized labor.
Crises plagued both nations nevertheless during this period of economic
transition. By contrast, in nations that retained more elite-based party
systems, union movements were weaker, development strategies gener-
ally were less interventionist, and economic crises during the transition
to neoliberalism tended to be less severe (see Roberts 2002).
Not only were economic crises more severe in the countries with
strong labor-mobilizing parties, but the political trauma associated with
the shift from IS1 to neoliberalism was also more disruptive. The most
electorally stable party systems in Latin America during the 1980s and
1990s were not those boasting strong mass-based party organizations, as
the European literature would lead us to expect (Bartolini and Mair
19901, but rather those rooted in nineteenth-century oligarchic forms of
domination (see Roberts and Wibbels 1999). The average Pedersen elec-
toral volatility score between 1980 and 1998 in nations lacking a strong
labor-mobilizing party was 19.3, compared to 29.8 in the nations that
possessed such a party (Roberts 2002).
In part, this reflects the greater political costs and sharp anti-incum-
bent vote swings that accompanied acute economic crises in the nations
with a strong labor-mobilizing party. High levels of electoral volatility in
these party systems, however, also suggest that the demise of IS1 and
the shift toward neoliberalism was more disruptive of their party-society
linkages. Although it is often assumed that the state retrenchment and
economic austerity prescribed by neoliberal formulas threaten the
patronage networks that allow elite-based parties to expand their elec-
toral constituencies (Geddes 1994), these parties have proven to be
highly resilient and capable of retaining (or adapting) their societal link-
46 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 45: 3

ages. Indeed, an extensive body of research suggests that clientelistic

linkages remain a highly salient political resource in the neoliberal era
(Dresser 1994; Levitsky 1998; Roberts 1995). Because patron-clientelism
tends to thrive under conditions of scarcity that preclude universal pro-
grams of social assistance and force a resort to particularistic criteria,
clientelistic linkages may remain strong even in a context of resource
constraints, and the individualized exchanges on which they are built
certainly conform to a neoliberal social landscape where large-scale col-
lective actors have been notably weakened.
In contrast, the encapsulating corporatist linkages that existed in
countries with a strong labor-mobilizing party have clearly weakened as
a result of the crisis of IS1 and the adoption of structural adjustment poli-
cies. Social and economic change have eroded the foundations of this
pattern of political representation; and while this does not in itself pre-
ordain a collapse of the party system, it ensures that large social blocs
will increasingly detach themselves from the collective organizations
that previously bound them to political parties. Parties’ hold on encap-
sulated social constituencies weakens; to survive, parties must forge
new, less organic, and more contingent linkages to an increasingly indi-
vidualized electorate. Survival thus becomes heavily dependent on par-
ties’ ability to adapt and generate instrumental support through their
performance in office.

The challenges posed to traditional party-society linkages by the eco-

nomic crisis and transition of the 1980s and 1990s can be clearly seen
in the Venezuelan case. As in other countries with a strong labor-mobi-
lizing party, the post-1958 party system in Venezuela developed exten-
sive clientelist and corporatist linkages to social constituencies. Both AD
and COPE1 cultivated networks of party clients as they distributed public
sector jobs and political or economic favors in exchange for political
support. The steady expansion of the public sector after 1958 helped to
extend these clientelist networks, which swelled to unsustainable levels
in the 1970s as the petroleum windfall entered state coffers and the gov-
ernment invested enormous sums in industrial and infrastructure proj-
ects, private sector credits, and social programs.
Total government expenditures increased 150 percent between 1970
and 1981, while the public sector share of GDP ballooned from 14.6
percent in the early 1970s to 37.6 percent in 1978 (Karl 1997, 249, 142).
By the mid-l970s, public funds accounted for nearly 90 percent of
industrial investments. Public sector employment also swelled, from
only 6.7 percent of the workforce in 1950 to 19.1 percent in 1971 and
 ROBERTS: VENEZUELA’S PARTIES 47

24.4 percent in 1981 (Crisp 2000, 170). Given the existence of a highly
intervenionist state that, as Karl put it, “had the power to distribute raw
materials, grant tariff exemptions and subsidies, finance private firms,
set price controls, and decide who might enter an industry” (1997, 1581,
the private sector became highly dependent on rent-seeking ties to
public officials, just as ordinary Venezuelans increasingly relied on gov-
ernment jobs, consumer subsidies, and social programs.
Clientelism was complemented by the more collective, corporatist
linkages forged between the dominant parties and national labor and
campesino confederations (see Ellner 1995). Strong ties had existed
between organized labor and AD since the 1940s, when the populist
party beat out the Communist Party for leadership of the labor move-
ment (Collier and Collier 1991, 252-62). After 1958, the Venezuelan
labor movement developed into one of the strongest and most politi-
cally influential in Latin America, although its autonomy from the AD
was heavily restricted. By the 1980s, more than a quarter of the work-
force belonged to labor unions (well above the regional norm), and
over 80 percent of these unions were incorporated into the Confedera-
tion of Venezuelan Workers (CTV), which was dominated by AD but
included representatives from COPEI and minor parties as well.
Organized labor was well represented inside the AD through the
party’s Labor Bureau, which Coppedge calls “probably the most impor-
tant broker in the party, because of its size and impressive ability to
mobilize its membership” (1994, 112). Labor was also represented in
AD’Scongressional delegation, and it had a voice in public administra-
tion and policymaking through seats on the governing boards of
bureaucratic agencies and tripartite advisory commissions (see Crisp
2000). Although these political linkages limited organized labor’s mili-
tancy and autonomy, they also produced substantial material rewards:
Venezuelan workers benefited from some of the highest wages and the
most heavily protected labor market in Latin America (Marquez and
Pages 1998, 6). The state established extensive legal restrictions on job
dismissals, and union members received privileged access to social
security and government subsidies for food, transportation, and health
care (Coppedge 1994, 33; see also Davis and Coleman 1989). The gov-
ernment heavily subsidized the national labor movement and made
major contributions to a workers’ bank that financed its own enterprises
and “established a virtual financial empire under the control of the CTV”
(Crisp 2000, 171).
The nature of these corporatist and clientelist linkages and the
mechanisms by which they were forged and reproduced broadly reseni-
bled those in other Latin American countries with a strong labor-mobi-
lizing party. Comparatively speaking, however, petroleum revenues
gave the Venezuelan state, and by extension AD and COPEI, greater
48 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 45:3

resources to create and sustain these linkages, and they probably

expanded the range of individuals and social actors incorporated in
materially based partisan networks. Capitalists, workers, campesinos,
and middle-class citizens all participated in the distribution of
Venezuela’s oil rents. Over the course of Venezuela’s democratic expe-
rience, these corporatist and clientelist networks crowded out other
types of bonds between parties and their constituencies, leaving politi-
cal representation contingent o n highly instrumental forms of attach-
ment. For example, programmatic and ideological bonds had been
prominent during the gestation of the modern Venezuelan party system
in the 1930s and 1940s, and the ambitious social reforms promoted by
AD during the short-lived democratic trienio between 1945 and 1948 so
polarized the political arena that they stimulated the counterorganiza-
tion of conservative and elite forces behind COPEI. The negotiated
political pacts that ushered in the 1958 democratic transition, however,
required that AD tone down both its reformist objectives and its support
for lower-class social mobilization (Karl 1987), and over the course of
the next several decades, both AD and COPEI gravitated to the political
center in a competitive struggle to capture the median voter (Downs
1957). Likewise, the party system in its formative years possessed a sig-
nificant class cleavage, with working and lower classes offering staunch
support to AD and elite sectors backing COPEI. This cleavage dissi-
pated, however, as the parties converged programmatically and were
transformed into multiclass, catchall electoral parties that sought to
appeal to a broad cross-section of Venezuelan society (Myers 1998).
Consequently, by the 1970s, the political arena was dominated by
two party organizations that were all but indistinguishable in their pro-
grammatic stances and relatively undifferentiated in their social make-
up, despite AD’S ongoing corporatist ties to organized labor and peas-
ant groups. Political loyalties based on class identities and ideological
appeal had clearly waned (Alvarez 1996), and parties had lost their
capacity to represent distinct social groups or policy alternatives. What
remained was a struggle for power between competing machines that
possessed alternative networks of individual and collective clienteles. As
Karl states, the two dominant parties had evolved into “machines for
extracting rents from the public arena” (1997, 93) and distributing them
as political patronage.
The structural bases for this pattern of political representation were
gradually undermined by social and economic changes after the early
1980s, when the global debt crisis and plunging oil prices created severe
fiscal and balance of payments problems in Venezuela. First, the corpo-
ratist linkages were weakened by the combination of prolonged eco-
nomic hardship and changes in the labor market. Both labor and
campesino movements, historic allies of the AD, were emasculated in
 ROBERTS: VENEZUELA’S PARTIES 49

the process. An oil-inflated currency undermined the competitiveness of

Venezuelan agriculture; combined with other structural changes in the
economy, this caused the portion of the workforce devoted to agricul-
tural activities to plummet from 40.3 percent in 1961 to a mere 10.8 per-
cent in 1996 (Wilkie et al. 1999, 365, 377), neutralizing the political sig-
nificance of AD’s ties to campesino organizations. The flight from
agriculture was especially dramatic during the first four years of market-
oriented reform between 1989 and 1992, when an estimated six hun-
dred thousand people abandoned the countryside (Bolivar and Perez
Campos 1996, 52).
Similarly, according to data provided by the International Labour
Organization (1997, 2351, union membership fell by nearly one-third
between 1988 and 1995, a period of deepening economic crisis punctu-
ated by market reforms and a heterodox retrenchment. The percentage of
the workforce belonging to trade unions was cut nearly in half, declining
from 26.4 percent to 13.5 percent over the same period. Over the course
of the 1980s and 1990s, employment gradually shifted from heavily union-
ized formal sectors of the economy-the public sector and large-scale pri-
vate enterprises-to informal sectors where unionization was less
common. Indeed, the portion of the workforce engaged in informal activ-
ities surged from 34.5 percent in 1980 (Sunkel 1994, 155) to 53 percent in
1999 (Economist Intelligence Unit 2000, 16). The CTV did not effectively
articulate the political identities or represent the interests of these infor-
mal workers. Even among workers who did belong to trade unions, the
CTV became less representative, as a powerful independent union
movement emerged in the southern industrial state of Bolivar with polit-
ical ties to a rising leftist party, La Causa R (L6pez-Maya 1997).
Corporatist bonds were frayed even further by the initiation of
neoliberal reforms by AD president Carlos Andrks Perez in 1989. Perez,
a populist figure renowned for extravagant public spending during an
earlier stint in the presidency during the mid-1970s oil boom, had been
supported by the AD Labor Bureau against the preferred candidate of the
party hierarchy in the 1988 election. Once reelected, however, he broke
with AD’s statist tradition and his own populist image by implementing
a harsh stabilization and structural adjustment program. The reform
package triggered a violent backlash, with widespread urban riots in
February 1989 that were repressed by the military, leaving hundreds
dead. The economic reforms and popular protests trapped the CTV
between its political loyalty to AD and its need to maintain its legitimacy
with its rank and file. Frontal opposition to the reforms would have
endangered organized labor’s political access, which was already being
challenged by Perez’s technocratic style of policymaking and the grow-
ing rift between the president and AD. An overly conciliatory stance, on
the other hand, could cause the labor leadership to be outflanked by the
50 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 45: 3

more militant opposition tactics of independent leftist unions and civic

protest groups. The CTV therefore declared one general strike and
expressed moderate criticism of the reforms before returning to a more
collaborative stance and negotiating with the government for conces-
sions in specified areas (see Ellner 1995; Burgess 1999).
In the process, however, organized labor lost much of its capacity
to channel the growing popular resistance to neoliberal reform. New
grassroots protest movements sprang u p among the urban poor, where
AD’Sorganizational penetration was less thorough. An increasingly com-
plex and diversified civil society was largely excluded from traditional
corporatist consultative institutions (Crisp 2000), while the labor and
business associations that did participate came to be perceived as
narrow, politically compromised interest groups whose rent-seeking
demands clashed with the realities of dwindling public resources,
market reforms, and technocratic policymaking.
The loosening of encapsulating corporatist linkages, which followed
the earlier erosion of ideological bonds and social cleavages, left the
Venezuelan party system highly dependent on patronage distributions,
socialized partisan identities, and general performance criteria to repro-
duce its electoral support. The remarkable durability of oligarchic party
systems in nations like Uruguay, Colombia, and Honduras suggests that
this package of attractions can sustain some party systems indefinitely.
Nevertheless, such continuity reflects a delicate balance that is difficult
to establish and maintain, because it requires that parties be able to dis-
tribute sufficient benefits to reproduce collective identities and preempt
alternative forms of social mobilization, without such payoffs becoming
so costly that they undermine macroeconomic performance or so arbi-
trary that they provoke a backlash against endemic corruption.
In a context of secular economic decline, Venezuela’s parties failed
to maintain such a delicate balance. With partisan patronage added to
the costs of corporatist distributions and massive generalized subsidies
for business and consumers, the Venezuelan state borrowed heavily
even in the midst of the oil boom of the 1970s, then sank into fiscal
crisis in the 1980s, when global interest rates tripled and oil prices
plunged. A prolonged period of economic stagnation punctuated by
short-lived boom-and-bust cycles began, with gradually accumulating
inflationary pressures. By the mid-1990s, per capita GDP had declined
by 20 percent from its late 1970s peak (Crisp 2000, 175). This smaller
economic pie also was distributed more unequally: whereas the income
share of the poorest 40 percent of the population fell from 19.1 percent
in 1981 to 14.7 percent in 1997, that of the wealthiest decile increased
from 21.8 to 32.8 percent (CEPAL 1999, 63). Real industrial wages in
1996 stood at less than 40 percent of their 1980 level (International
Labour Organization 1998, 43), while per capita social spending by the
 ROBERTS: VENEZUELA'S PARTIES 51

state in 1993 was 40 percent below the 1980 level (Repliblica de

Venezuela 1995, 40). Between 1984 and 1993, the percentage of the
population living below the poverty line increased from 36 percent to
62 percent, while the percentage living in extreme poverty tripled, from
11 percent to 33 percent (Repliblica de Venezuela 1995, 23).
Clearly, the Venezuelan party system had ceased to distribute gener-
alized material benefits, making it incapable of mobilizing support on the
basis of instrumental performance criteria. Furthermore, the parties' ongo-
ing efforts to dispense selective patronage in a context of acute economic
hardship merely contributed to their delegitimation, as public revulsion
against political corruption spread. Public opinion surveys placed politi-
cal parties last (and labor unions second from last) in confidence ratings
of national institutions, and repeatedly showed that Venezuelan citizens
blamed the political establishment and rampant corruption for creating an
economic crisis in an oil-rich nation (see Romero 1997).
The combination of prolonged economic crisis and social change
eroded both the corporatist and clientelist linkages that Venezuelan par-
ties had created in their mediation between the state and society. This
erosion is certainly not unique to the Venezuelan case; clientelism is
under pressure throughout Latin America in an era of market liberaliza-
tion, and corporatist bonds and labor movements have been seriously
weakened by economic crisis and reform in virtually all the nations that
used to possess a strong labor-mobilizing party (Roberts 2002). In most
of these other nations, however, established party systems were shaken
but found ways to survive and adapt in a realigned form. Indeed, many
of them suffered economic crises that were even more severe, by some
measures, than that of Venezuela, which never experienced hyperinfla-
tion like that in Peru, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil.
Why, then, did established party systems in nations like Venezuela and
Peru decompose in the midst of economic crises in the 1990s, whereas
party systems in most of the rest of the region found ways to hold on?
These divergent outcomes are heavily contingent on the distribution
of political costs and dividends associated with economic crisis, stabi-
lization, and reform during the transition from IS1 to neoliberalism.
Where party system adaptation occurred, acute economic crisis was typ-
ically of shorter duration, imposing political defeats on a n incumbent
party while giving an opposition party the opportunity to take office and
reap political rewards from economic stabilization. This dynamic con-
tained the political costs associated with economic crisis and internal-
ized the political dividends attendant to stabilization within the party
system, facilitating adaptation and realignment.
In contrast, party system decomposition is more likely when a crisis
endures through successive administrations, spreading the political costs
more widely across the party system as a series of parties fail to achieve
52 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 45: 3

stabilization. Established parties thus bear the full brunt of the political
costs associated with economic crisis, and the electorate is increasingly
inclined to turn to a political outsider as a potential solution, giving out-
siders the opportunity to reap the political rewards of stabilization. The
political economy literature has often stressed the severity of crises in
creating political conditions that are conducive to structural adjustment;
but when it comes to the fate of party systems, the duration of an eco-
nomic crisis may well be the more important consideration.
This dynamic can clearly be seen in Venezuela and Peru, the most
prominent cases of party system decomposition during the transition
from IS1 to neoliberalism. In Venezuela, the economic crisis gradually
deepened but never engendered a hyperinflationary spiral with such
immense short-term costs that it would induce public support for the
bitter medicine of structural adjustment policies (see Weyland 1998).
Consequently, the dominant parties chose to “muddle through” and
resist painful economic reforms, a pattern that was reinforced by AD’S
aforementioned inflexible bureaucratic structure (Corrales 2000; Levitsky
2001). The crisis therefore lingered on, politically damaging COPEI and
AD administrations in succession for their failure to reverse the slide.
When Perez defied his populist campaign message by adopting a harsh
neoliberal package to preempt a deepening foreign exchange and infla-
tionary crisis, the public turned on the party system with a vengeance,
and the groundswell of support for political outsiders commenced.
The electorate first opted for a familiar and “safe”outsider in former
COPEI leader and ex-president Rafael Caldera, who broke with his party
to win an independent bid for the presidency in 1993. By the end of the
decade, however, when a series of independents vied for the presi-
dency, voters sided overwhelmingly with Chhvez, who offered the most
thorough break with the traditional order and the most virulent antine-
oliberal line. A prolonged crisis produced systemic political costs that
were only exacerbated by the long tradition of collusion between AD
and COPEI; the two parties were held jointly responsible for the secu-
lar decline in economic performance, and neither could throw a lifeline
to the party system by restoring prosperity.
In Peru, a prolonged economic crisis elicited a similar cumulative,
systemic political effect as first one party and then another tried but
failed to manage a recovery in the 1980s, causing the electorate to
punish the entire political establishment and search for an outside
savior. Fujimori could then reap the political dividends from economic
stabilization, furthering the demise of the traditional party system.
It is not surprising that Peru and Venezuela have by far the worst
scores in Latin America on one of the clearest indicators of long-term
change in popular living standards, the decline in real industrial wages.
In 1996, Venezuela’s real wage index stood at only 38.8 percent of its
 ROBERTS: VENEZUELA’S PARTIES 53

1980 level, while Peru’s stood at 42.4 percent, compared to an average

of 102.6 percent in the rest of the region (International Labour Organi-
zation 1998, 43). A party system with reserves of support drawn from
recent struggles to defend human rights or restore democratic gover-
nance might be able to survive such a negative economic performance.
For the Venezuelan party system, however, in which the social linkages
and political legitimacy were so heavily dependent o n its ability to
deliver material benefits, the secular decline in popular living standards
proved devastating.

FROMCRISIS TO PARTY SYSTEM DEMISE

According to Converse, the more entrenched a party system is, the more
severe a shock it must be to induce fundamental systemic change (1969,
167). In Venezuela, the demise of IS1 and the aborted shift to neoliberal-
ism proved to be just such a shock. Venezuela’s party system stood at the
apex of a mode of representation that was deeply embedded in a state-
led IS1 model of development, and the demise of IS1 eroded the social
and economic moorings of this mode of representation. As the economy
settled into an endemic crisis and the social landscape became increas-
ingly informalized and impoverished, both the corporatist and clientelist
bonds that linked established parties to social constituencies were emas-
culated. The parties lost their capacity to distribute generalized material
benefits, making their resort to more selective forms of patronage
increasingly vulnerable to an anticorruption backlash. Economic reforms
were diluted by entrenched interests and popular hostility, leaving the
Venezuelan economy increasingly out of step with regional trends. By
the mid-1990s, both orthodox and heterodox programs had failed to
reverse the economic slide, and both AD and COPE1 were seriously dis-
credited by their cumulative economic mismanagement. The electorate
eventually turned on the political establishment with a vengeance, plac-
ing its trust in an insurgent populist who promised to sweep aside the
purtidocrucia and refound the Venezuelan republic.
Chivez quickly replaced party-based mediation between state and
society with a direct, personalistic relationship between the masses and a
charismatic, though highly divisive, caudillo. His party organ was a classic,
poorly institutionalized personalistic movement; although he has taken
steps to create grassroots organs of popular power linked to his adminis-
tration, the personalism of executive authority has, to date, impeded the
reconstruction of representative institutions. The Chivez administration
helped to engineer a dramatic rise in global oil prices after taking office,
but acute conflicts with business and pro-AD sectors of organized labor
blocked economic recovery and made it difficult to secure the president’s
popular constituencies through the provision of material rewards.
54 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 45: 3

By the beginning of 2002, political conflict and social mobilization

had clearly exceeded the channeling capacities of established institu-
tions. After a series of opposition protests and strikes, Chkvez was
briefly toppled by a probusiness military coup in April and then restored
to power by a furious countermobilization of predominantly lower-class
civilian and military supporters. The Venezuelan polity has thus entered
a period of extreme polarization and institutional uncertainty, with a
highly personalistic regime encountering a deeply divided society in
which neither progovernment nor opposition sectors are effectively rep-
resented by partisan institutions and are increasingly willing to conduct
politics by force.
Following several decades of highly institutionalized, consensus-
based politics, this progressive slide toward praetorianism provides an
instructive counterpoint to the status quo biases of most conventional
approaches to the study of political institutions. The Venezuelan case
demonstrates that institutions are not fixed and confining determinants
of political behavior; although designed for reproduction, they are sub-
ject to decay under certain conditions. As such, institutions should be
treated as dependent variables as well as independent ones, and schol-
ars should strive to identify the contingent outcomes of sociopolitical
processes that lead to both institution building and institutional decay.
Although the process of decay in Venezuela manifests a number of dis-
tinctive features, it still corresponds to a broader causal logic that is best
illuminated through comparative analysis.

NOTES
Portions of this article were published in slightly different form in Spanish
as “La descomposici6n del sistema de partidos en Venezuela vista desde un
an5lisis comparativo,” Revista Venezolana de Economfa y Ciencias Sociales 7 , 2
(May-August 2001): 183-200.
1 . Costa Rica and Uruguay, which developed strong welfare states by Latin
American standards, are partial outliers on this particular dimension, but in other
respects they fit the general pattern. Uruguay was the only country in this cate-
gory to experience triple-digit inflation, but it did not fall prey to hyperinflation
like most of the countries with a labor-mobilizing party system.

REFERENCES
Alvarez, Angel Eduardo. 1996. La crisis de hegemonia de 10s partidos politicos
venezolanos. In El sistema politico venezolano: crisis y transformaciones,
ed. Alvarez. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela. 131-54.
Bartolini, Stefano, and Peter Mair. 1990. Identity, Competition, and Electoral
Availability: me Stabilisation of European Electorates, 1885-1985.Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
 ROBERTS: VENEZUELA'S PARTIES 55

Benton, Allyson Lucinda. 1997. Patronage Games: The Effects of Economic

Reform on Internal Party Politics and Party System Stability in Latin Amer-
ica. Paper presented at the 1997 meeting of the American Political Science
Association, Washington, DC, August 28-31.
Bolivar, Ligia, and Magaly Perez Campos. 1996. El sistema d e derechos humanos
en la constituci6n d e 1961 y propuestas de reforma. In El sistema politico
venezolano: crisis y transformaciones, ed. Angel Eduardo Alvarez. Caracas:
Universidad Central de Venezuela.
Burgess, Katrina. 1999. Loyalty Dilemmas and Market Reform: Party-Union
Alliances Under Stress in Mexico, Spain, and Venezuela. World Politics 5 2 ,
1 (October): 105-34.
Cavarozzi, Marcelo. 1994. Politics: A Key for the Long Term in South America.
In Latin American Political Economy in the Age of Neoliberal Reform, ed.
William C. Smith, Carlos H. Acufia, and Eduardo A. Gamarra. New
Brunswick: Transaction. 127-55.
Collier, Ruth Berins, and David Collier. 1991. Shaping the Political Arena: Crit-
ical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin Amer-
ica. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Conniff, Michael L., ed. 1982. Latin American Populism in Comparative Per-
spective. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Converse, Philip E. 1969. Of Time and Partisan Stability. Comparative Political
Studies 2, 2 (July): 139-71.
Coppedge, Michael. 1994. Strong Parties and Lame Ducks: Presidential Party-
archy and Fuctionalism in Venezuela. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Corrales, Javier. 2000. Presidents, Ruling Parties, and Party Rules: A Theory on
the Politics of Economic Reform in Latin America. Comparative Politics 32,
2 (January): 127-49.
Crewe, Ivor, and David Denver, eds. 1985. Electoral Change in Western Democ-
racies: Patterns and Sources of Electoral Volatility. New York: St. Martin's.
Crisp, Brian. 2000. Democratic Institutional Design: 7he Powers and Incentives
of Venezuelan Politicians and Interest Groups. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Dalton, Russell, Scott C. Flanagan, and Paul Allen Beck, eds. 1984. Electoral
Change in Aduanced Industrial Democracies: Realignment or Dealign-
ment? Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Davis, Charles L., and Kenneth M . Coleman. 1989. Political Control of Organized
Labor in a Semi-Consociational Democracy: The Case of Venezuela. In
Labor Autonomy and the State in Latin America, ed. Edward C. Epstein.
Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Dornbusch, Rudiger, and Sebastian Edwards, eds. 1991. 7he Macroeconomics of
Populism in Latin America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic 73eor-y of Dernocracy. New York: Harpei-
and Row.
Drake, Paul W. 1982. Conclusion: Requiem for Populism? In Conniff 1982.
217-45.
Dresser, Denise. 1991, Neopopulist Solutions to Neoliberal Problems: Mexico 4
National Solidarity Program. San Diego: Center for US-Mexican Studies,
University of California.
56 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 45: 3

Economist Intelligence Unit. 2000. Country Projlle 2000: Venezuela. London:

Economist.
Ellner, Steve. 1995. El sindicalismo en Venezuela en el context0 democratic0
(1958-1994). Caracas: Fondo Editorial Tropykas.
Geddes, Barbara. 1994. Politician's Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin
America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Inglehart, Ronald. 1990. Culture ShiJit in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
International Labour Organization. 1997. 1997 Labour Overview:Latin America
and the Caribbean. Lima: International Labour Organization.
-. 1998. 1998 Labour Overview: Latin America and the Caribbean. Lima:
International Labour Organization.
Karl, Terry Lynn. 1987. Petroleum and Political Pacts: The Transition to Democ-
racy in Venezuela. Latin American Research Review 22, 1: 63-94.
-, 1997. 7be Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
Kaufman, Robert R. 1977. Corporatism, Clientelism, and Partisan Conflict: A
Study of Seven Latin American Countries. In Authoritarianism and Corpo-
ratism in Latin America, ed. James Malloy. Pittsburgh: University of Pitts-
burgh Press. 109-48.
Kitschelt, Herbert. 1994. m e Transformation of European Social Democracy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kornblith, Miriam. 1998. Venezuela en 10s noventa: [as crisis de la democracia.
Caracas: Ediciones IESA.
Levitsky, Steven. 1998. Crisis, Party Adaptation, and Regime Stability in
Argentina: The Case of Peronism, 1989-1995. Party Politics 4, 4: 445-70.
-. 2001. Organization and Labor-Based Party Adaptation: The Transformation
of Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective. World Politics 54 (Octo-
ber): 27-56.
Lijphart, Arend J., and Carlos H. Waisman, eds. 1996. Institutional Design in New
Democracies: Eastern Europe and Latin America. Boulder: Westview Press.
Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Stein Rokkan. 1967. Cleavage Structures, Party Sys-
tems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction. In Party Systems and Voter
Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives, ed. Lipset and Rokkan. New York:
Free Press. 1-64.
Lopez-Maya, Margarita. 1997. The Rise of Causa R in Venezuela. In m e New Poli-
tics of Inequality in Latin America: Rethinking Participation and Represen-
tation, ed. Douglas A. Chalmers, Carlos M. Vilas, Katherine Hite, Scott B.
Martin, Kerianne Piester, and Monique Segarra. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press. 117-43.
Mainwaring, Scott P. 1999. Rethinking Party System in the mird Wave of
Democratization: 7be Case of Brazil. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Mainwaring, Scott P., and Timothy R. Scully, eds. 1995. Building Democratic Insti-
tutions: Party Systems in Latin America. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Mair, Peter. 1997. Party System Change:Approaches and Interpretations.Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
March, James G., and Johan P. Olsen. 1989. Rediscovering Institutions: m e
Organizational Basis of Politics. New York: Free Press.
 ROBERTS: VENEZUELA'S PARTIES 57

Mirquez, Gustavo, and Carmen Pages. 1998. Ties That Bind: Employment Pro-
tection and Labor Market Outcomes in Latin America. Working Paper 373.
Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank.
Myers, David J. 1998. Venezuela's Political Party System: Defining Events, Reac-
tions, and the Diluting of Structural Cleavages. Party Politics 4, 4: 495-521.
North, Douglas. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Perfor-
mance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Penfold Becerra, Michael. 2000. El colapso del sistema de partidos en Venezuela:
explicaci6n d e una muerte anunciada. Paper presented at the 22d meeting
of the Latin American Studies Association, Miami, March 16-18.
Remmer, Karen L. 1997. Theoretical Decay and Theoretical Development: The
Resurgence of Institutional Analysis. World Politics 50 (October): 34-61.
Repiiblica de Venezuela. 1995. Venezuela ante la cumbre mundial sobre desa-
rrollo social. Caracas.
Roberts, Kenneth M. 1995. Neoliberalism and the Transformation of Populism in
Latin America: The Peruvian Case. World Politics 48 (October): 82-116.
-. 2002. Social Inequalities Without Class Cleavages in Latin America's
Neoliberal Era. Studies in Comparative International Development 36, 4
(Winter): 3-33.
Roberts, Kenneth M., and Erik Wibbels. 1999. Party Systems and Electoral
Volatility in Latin America: A Test of Economic, Institutional, and Structural
Explanations. American Political Science Review 93, 3 (September): 575-90.
Romero, Anibal. 1997. Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic: The Agony
of Democracy in Venezuela. Latin American Research Review 32, 1: 7-36.
Shugart, Matthew Soberg, and John M. Carey. 1992. Presidents and Assemblies:
Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Sunkel, Osvaldo. 1994. La crisis social d e America Latina: una perspectiva
neoestructuralista. In Pobreza y modelos de desarrollo en AmBrica Latina,
ed. Eduardo S . Bustelo, Felix Bombarolo, and Hordcio E. Caride. Wash-
ington, DC: Economic Development Institute.
United Nations. Comisidn Econdmico y Politico para America Latina (CEPAL).
1999. Anuario estadistico de AmBrica Latina y el Caribe. Santiago d e Chile:
CEPAL.
Weyland, Kurt. 1996. Neoliberalism and Neopopulism in Latin America: Unex-
pected Affinities. Studies in Comparative International Development 31
(Fall): 3-31.
-. 1998. The Political Fate of Market Reform in Latin America, Africa, and
Eastern Europe. International Studies Quarterly 42: 645-74.
Wilkie, James W., Eduardo Alemin, and Jose Guadalupe Ortega, eds. 1999. Sta-
tistical Abstract of Latin America, Vol. 35. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin Ameri-
can Center.
Williamson, John, ed. 1990. Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Hap-
pened? Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics.