Introduction

Interest in Venezuela has surged since the coup d’état in April 2002 and the bursting of Hugo Chavez on to the international political scene. However, with a view to explaining the background to Chavez’ election in December 1998, VSC is offering readers a lengthy analysis of the pre 1998 political conditions in Venezuela so as to foster a better understanding of Venezuelan political reality to trade unionists and the public in general. VSC is certain that after reading this document that a clearer understanding will emerge as to the whys and wherefores of Chavez’ electoral triumph and his continued popularity, not only in Venezuela but throughout the Americas as a whole and beyond.

The comprehensive election victories of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez during 1998 and 1999 clearly indicate the final discrediting of that country’s ‘partidocratic’ system of government. While this system had its faults, it did allow Acción Democrática and COPEI to establish themselves, for a time, as two of the most institutionalised political parties in the whole region. Yet the Venezuelan party system, once very strong, has now broken down as a direct result of electoral rejection. This is despite the fact that political scientists have tended to regard a strong party system as essential to democracy. On the face of it, this combination of facts seems troubling.

This discussion seeks to draw some lessons from the Venezuelan experience. It argues that there are two such lessons at least. One is that party systems may be vulnerable to de-institutionalisation (i.e. withdrawal of public respect) if political elites are allowed to get away with large-scale law breaking. This is because democratic contestation on its own provides insufficient check on the exercise of power without responsibility. The second conclusion is that ‘checks-and-balances’ systems of politics may be worse than ‘winner takes all’ systems in the second-best world of unreliable law enforcement. This is because seriously disaffected electors can, in a winner-takes-all system vote to reject an existing government without going further and undermining an entire political system. In the Venezuelan case, the difficulty of reforming the ‘checks-and-balances’ based democratic system when it lost public respect opened the way for a radical populist challenge.

The argument is backed up by empirical case studies relating to civil-military relations and to the constraining effect of corruption upon the electoral strategies of the dominant parties.

Prior to 1998, much of the writing on the Venezuelan political system fell into two categories. Economists with direct experience of policymaking such as Naim and Rodríguez were highly critical of the way in which Venezuelan institutions worked. They tended to blame institutional flaws for the inability of policymakers to deal with the effect of lower oil prices after 1986(1). On the other hand, most US political scientists who wrote about Venezuela in the early 1990s –including some genuinely eminent scholars- were far more positive about the party system. For example, in a work, significantly entitled Building Democratic Institutions published as recently as 1995, Kornblith and Levine conclude that 'political parties and the system built around them (the party system in our terms) have contributed mightily to the creation and survival of democracy in Venezuela.' (2). In a work published in 1994 Coppedge also referred to Venezuela's 'unique advantages -uncommon leadership, unusually strong political parties and extraordinary oil wealth.'(3). Events seem to have proved the Naim/Rodriguez view correct and the Levine/Coppedge view wrong. This leaves political science with some explaining to do. Why should a political system that was regarded by many as one of the best-designed in Latin America have come so seriously unstuck?

Until the end of the 1980s, Venezuela clearly did have one of the strongest (if not the strongest) party systems in Latin America. Moreover it was free of some of those weaknesses from which some other party systems in Latin America have suffered. Those who ran the dominant parties were politically moderate. They routinely negotiated and co-operated with each other. There was little political exclusivity. The result was a significant degree of consensus within the political elite. The kind of social polarisation that led to crisis and tragedy in Spain in 1936 and Chile in 1973 never seemed likely to happen in Venezuela.

There is a view within comparative politics that political pact-making within the governing elite can be very positive for democratic stability (4). Venezuela scored highly here. Venezuela also had a relatively weak presidential institution (5). This was also seen as positive by some scholars because it prevented the emergence of a 'winner takes all' pattern of politics famously denounced by Linz (6).

Indeed, according to most of the criteria accepted by 1990s political science as predictive of democratic stability, Venezuela scored high (7). In addition theoretical arguments in favour of the post-1958 democratic system seemed confirmed for many years by public opinion survey data which found considerable public approval for Venezuela’s political system (8). If we define institutionalisation as ‘infusion with value’ then the Venezuelan party political system did indeed seem institutionalised by the 1970s. As a result of this combination of circumstances, some observers came to regard Venezuela as an example for countries elsewhere in the region to follow during the democratic wave of the 1980s (9).

So where did it all go wrong? It is evident that the institutionalisation of party politics can in principle be reversed. This is not a point that the literature has sufficiently considered. However the fact that reversal is possible is not in itself an explanation for why it should happen. Economic factors played a part in the Venezuelan case. There can be no doubt that falling oil prices created real difficulties for Venezuelan policymakers. Furthermore the structure of Venezuelan commodity dependency may have made this problem particularly acute (10).

However there are several reasons why economic decline cannot be the whole explanation for Venezuela’s party-political crisis. One is that any economy dependent on the export of primary products will at some point experience falling export prices and recession. Market-oriented reform has not abolished the trade cycle within Latin America. If any Latin American country’s political institutions are not robust against a period of economic downturn, then they must be considered flawed.

Naim and Rodríguez present an additional reason why economic factors cannot provide the whole explanation. This is because the political system seriously obstructed necessary economic adjustments after the oil price fell. There can be no real dispute that market-oriented reform in several other Latin American countries proved less obstructed and more successful than it did in Venezuela. In some such countries (Argentina and Bolivia for example) the extent of the economic crisis in the 1980s was at least as bad as in Venezuela but policy reforms worked and the party system survived. If the Venezuelan party system was even partly responsible for the extent of Venezuela's post-1986 economic decline, then the argument that the economic decline was responsible for problems in the party system becomes circular.  It is also the case, finally, that an argument couched purely in economic terms would fail to explain why Chávez was able to maintain a high level of popularity during 1999, which was a year of severe recession in Venezuela. 

It seems evident that there must be an important non-economic aspect to the de-institutionalisation of Venezuela’s party political system. This aspect has so far been under-researched. The argument here is that there was a weakness in the working of core state institutions, notably the military and the judiciary. The research presented here focuses precisely on these institutions. There are really two conclusions. One is that the Venezuelan political system failed to resolve a fundamental problem in party-state relations. This problem was a lack of state impartiality and autonomy. The over-penetration of the state by party machines meant that party elites were effectively above the law, behaved accordingly and seriously alienated the Venezuelan public as a result. The second problem is that, once there came to be unmistakable signs of public alienation from the system, Venezuela’s pluralist institutions lacked the ability to respond constructively to negative feedback. The system could not reform itself successfully when things started to go wrong. As politicians became more unpopular and respect for them declined, so the difficulties of reform became even greater. This is not because Venezuela lacked able politicians but because the system was designed to make it easier to block powerful leaders than to facilitate change from above. As reforms became increasingly necessary, so ease with which reform initiates could be obstructed become increasingly destructive. In most cases, moreover, reforms were obstructed more for particularistic motives than out of any alternative vision of Venezuela’s future.

If this argument is correct, then at least some scholarly work on democracy in Latin America needs to be reassessed. Work on elective institutions has often departed from the assumption that it is dangerous to concentrate power and advantageous to diffuse it (11). This may sometimes be true but the validity of the argument does rather depend on whether non-elective state institutions work well. Where they do work well, there may be good reasons for limiting the majoritarian aspects of a democracy. However when state institutions work badly, then it is vital to find ways of getting them to work better. Otherwise the anger of disappointed majorities may be channelled against the elective aspects of the political system. Such an outcome is potentially destructive.

The research underpinning this argument is of three kinds. We look first at the February 1992 military coup and its aftermath. In the pre-coup period, patrimonialism undermined democratic authority over the military –an obviously serious matter in any Latin American country. Although the coup attempt failed, civil-military relations did not return to normal. Continuing restiveness within the military was an important explanation for the further weakening of democratic institutions during 1992-98. The discussion then moves on to look at the responses of politicians to the 1992 political crisis. It seeks to understand the failure of the party elites to make any serious effort to restore their lost prestige in the eyes of the general public. Finally the discussion looks at the failure of the traditional parties to deal with the threat posed by Chávez during the 1998 election campaign.

Although the issues discussed are different from each other, they all highlight problems with the political system. In each case, particularistic interests were left unchecked for too long. Politically-biased law enforcement was the primary problem and the protection given by a ‘checks and balances’ system to unpopular vested interests was an important secondary factor. Patterns of clientelism and corruption in Venezuelan politics long pre-dated the democratisation of the country in 1958. However the post-1958 political order put the needs of conciliation above the needs of making the state impartial and respected. The problem, in short, was that democracy did not change things enough. Old means of conducting politics, via patrimonialism, corruption and social authoritarianism, were not rooted out from the new democratic order. Moreover, by limiting the power of elected presidents, the post-1958 system closed off one important safety valve through which change could be introduced from within the system.

The February 1992 Coup Attempt and Civil-Military Relations

The February 4 coup took the government completely by surprise. President Pérez was said by a close associate to be 'muy golpeado' (very shaken up) by what had happened. According to the same source, military intelligence 'failed completely' to discover what had been going on (12). Another interview source, a Cabinet Minister at the time of the coup attempt stated that civilian control over the military was weak due to the penetration of military intelligence by the political parties, and its own involvement in corruption scandals. (13). The government's failure to predict or understand the coup attempt was also noted by observers who sympathised with Chávez. (14).

In the aftermath of the failed coup, the official government line was that the coup was the work of a few fanatics. Under such circumstances a failure of detection might have been lamentable but understandable. Not everybody found this explanation convincing at the time, but new revelations made by the coup leaders themselves show this initial assessment to have been wholly untenable.

We now know that the coup attempt had been planned for a long time and that it involved a considerable number of people. Chávez and two other officers had originally founded the so-called Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement as early as 1983 (15). This quickly became a focal point of dissent within the military, with actual coup preparations beginning in August 1991. Leadership of the coup attempt come from the middle ranks of the army. There was also significant support from within the Air Force.  Chávez was a Lt. Colonel while the other leaders were of similar or lower ranks. The attempt encountered considerable support from non-commissioned officers, which is unusual in post-1945 South America. After it failed, no fewer than 273 sergeants were dishonourably discharged from the military. The sheer number of those involved is sufficient refutation on its own of the idea that the coup was the work of a small number of extremists.

Chávez also stated that quite a lot of civilian support had been lined up behind the coup though much of this failed to materialise in the event (16). The coup leaders are still reluctant to mention the names of civilians whose support was expected, but Chávez did say that there were connections between the civilian far-Left and some of the non-commissioned officers who were prepared to back a coup. A conflict of leadership had led to the postponement of the coup attempt from 16 December 1991 to 4 February 1992 (17).  Given these details, it seems quite remarkable that, while all of the preparations were taking place, the Venezuelan authorities did not notice that anything was amiss. The subsequent attempt by government ministers to portray the coup attempt as the action of a tiny minority of fanatics caused further damage because those who knew the truth concluded that the government had lost its touch.

The coup attempt occurred at a time when the government was unpopular in the country as a whole and the political system substantially discredited. This difficult situation was to a degree the result of economic factors beyond the control of the politicians. However none of this explains the failure of the government to monitor developments within the military. In this context institutional factors do seem to be paramount.

Institutional problems in civil-military relations were not an isolated feature of the political system. On the contrary, they were entirely typical. Civilian control over the military broke down in the place where Venezuela’s political institutions were most vulnerable- at the point of conflict between the clientelistic practices of party politicians and the bureaucratic norms of a professionally run state. By February 1992 the middle and lower ranks of the army had become dangerously disaffected with the democratic order. This is a dangerous thing to happen in any society. While this disaffection had much to do with the general unpopularity of the government and falling living standards within the military, there was an important organisational consideration as well. This had to do with the patrimonialism of civilian politicians and needs a brief discussion.

There is often a tension in South America between the professional aspirations of the military hierarchy and the political control exerted by elected civilians. In the Venezuelan army, recruitment and promotion of officers according to military criteria of meritocracy were in place up to the level of Lieutenant Colonel. However promotion to Colonel or General had to be approved by Congress -which is to say, by the leaders of the two major parties. Winfield and Burgraaff may be right to say that there are only a few recorded instances of overt political interference in military promotions in Venezuela (18), but the overall perspective of more junior officers was that promotions procedures were heavily politicised. This was perceived as being contrary to the integrity and autonomy of the military.

In Venezuela, middle-ranking officers attend postgraduate courses at university. Several of the 1992 coup leaders were, at the time that the coup was being organised, studying political science at the Simon Bolivar University. One academic responsible for teaching the military at that university told the author that there was in 1992 overwhelming support within his class of army officers for Chávez and his coup attempt, and an almost total contempt for the Generals. These were seen as having sold out to the politicians for personal advantage (19). The middle ranking officers saw many of their seniors as poorly qualified political appointees. The senior officers had meanwhile lost touch with what was going on in the more junior ranks, since they interpreted their promotions (often correctly) as a reward for political rather than bureaucratic achievement.

Chávez later stated that no Colonel or General was involved in the February coup attempt (20). This in itself is not so very surprising: what is surprising is that no Colonel or General knew enough about what was being planned to bring it to the attention of the authorities. There is no possibility of any conspiracy of silence here. Senior officers would have had overwhelming reason to oppose a coup had they known that one was being planned, because a successful coup led by a Lt. Colonel would have totally upset the military hierarchy. In such an eventuality, all of the senior officers would have been visibly humiliated by evidence that they had failed to control their juniors and they would almost certainly have been forced to resign en masse.

The failure of party-based government to control the military is was therefore symptomatic of the general undermining of professional administration by patrimonialism. A similar phenomenon is in evidence in many other areas of the Venezuelan public sector as well. There is a considerable amount of research tending to suggest that state ineptitude or worse had by the early 1990s come to characterise virtually the entire public administration.  For example, research on the behaviour of the Federal Electoral Council in the early 1990s concluded that this, too, was controlled by the dominant parties and there was corruption, legal manipulation, incompetence and, on occasion, downright falsification of election results (21). The ultimate absurdity is that many of those appointed to oversee elections –political appointees- were so poorly qualified that they had difficulty in adding together large numbers. The failure of the state to operate in a professional way in many areas of social policy was also evident (22). The same point in respect of criminal justice policy will be discussed again in the next section.

The failure of the political elite to control and manage such core institutions as the military reflected deep-rooted problems of corruption and political favouritism. It also reflected a considerable failure of political judgement. In 1991 and early 1992 it was no great secret that the government was unpopular and that military officers resented the role which they had been required to play in putting down the Caracas riots of February 1989. Opinion polls were published in the press every few weeks, and the main parties conducted private polling of their own (23). Certainly the authorities should have known that any coup attempt in the early 1990s -even an unsuccessful one- might well trigger off an uncontrollable political crisis. Yet they were taken completely by surprise by a fairly well planned conspiracy which had been underway for months.

Civil-Military Relations between February 1992 and December 1998.

In the end, Venezuelan democracy survived two coup attempts in 1992 and several ‘near miss’ military-political situations between 1992 and 1998. Nevertheless, the February 1992 coup attempt definitively changed the character of Venezuelan democracy because it made it harder to reform the state. From then on, anticipated reactions from the military significantly shaped the political process and constrained policymaking. So did political reactions to the coup attempt itself. Former-president and independent presidential candidate Rafael Caldera made a speech in the immediate aftermath of the February coup, publicly declaring his support for some of the aims (though not the methods) of the coup leaders and promising them an amnesty should he be elected. This speech enormously helped Caldera’s electoral prospects as candidate for the presidency in 1993.

A fresh coup attempt occurred in November 1992 and there was another ‘near miss’ in late 1993. Chávez himself suggests that there was no successful coup during 1992-93 because Rafael Caldera, who was leading in the opinion polls ahead of the December 1993 presidential elections, enjoyed military support due his promise of amnesty for the original conspirators (24). The amnesty itself, when it eventually came, offered the February coup leaders an opportunity to replace a purely ‘military’ strategy with an electoral one that would trade on their new-found fame.

By the end of 1992 both US and Venezuelan intelligence services were beginning to penetrate the ranks of the potential golpistas: successful military intervention was therefore becoming harder to organise. In late 1993, for example, a group of officers visited the Pentagon to try to discover whether Washington would support a coup against Velazquez. The US administration secretly taped the conversations and passed them on to the Venezuelan president. (Confidential interview). The officers concerned were quietly moved on.

The election of Caldera, who took office in February 1994, did not end the crisis in civil-military relations. Caldera was, both by temperament and intellect, a conciliator. In office, his policy toward the military rebels was co-optative.  Chávez and the coup leaders were amnestied, and a proportion of those purged after the 1992 coup attempts (around 250 out of 500 originally forced out) were re-integrated into the army. The coup leaders themselves took advantage of their freedom to enter democratic politics and one of those involved in the coup, Arias Cárdenas, was in 1995 elected to the governorship of Zulia.

Caldera's treatment of the military was very much constrained by the threat of a new coup attempt. According to two close associates of Caldera, the incoming government regarded a renewed coup as a real possibility (25). So, indeed, did the US Government which -during an incident in July 1994- sent Defence Secretary William Perry to Caracas. Perry invited a number of Generals to a meeting at the US Embassy in Caracas and simply told them that the US would not tolerate a coup.

Caldera's treatment of the military was pragmatic and managerial rather than reforming. There was no real attempt to re-professionalise the army. Upon taking office in February 1994 Caldera sacked the entire military establishment, and promoted his son-in-law Rojas Pérez to a key position. When asked why he did this, he replied 'so I can sleep at night.'(26).The incoming government also allowed itself to be constrained in some of its policies by fear of military opposition. This was notably the case in its handling of the 1994 banking collapse. The government agreed to indemnity depositors in the failed banks and then imposed exchange controls to avoid capital flight. Taking a tougher attitude toward depositors was ruled out on political grounds. Luis Castro told the author that the government feared an 'Albanian situation' in which rioters might quickly come to control the streets if unrest developed. The government believed that the military could not be relied upon in the event of a renewed political crisis.

The Caldera government was accused by some of its critics of inertia in respects of several kinds of state reform. However if Caldera could afford neither civil nor military unrest (civil unrest might have brought in the military), the result was enormously to empower vote groups –especially in Congress where the government lacked a majority. It is true that Caldera did have policy options that he did not use, such as calling the military into government and closing Congress altogether. In a moment of crisis in July 1994 some senior political figures did publicly call on Caldera to close Congress down, and there was a widespread perception that Caldera did give the option serious thought (27). The military would probably have backed him in the short-term but perhaps reduced him to a figurehead thereafter. Had this happened of course, the ‘partidocratic’ political system would have ended even sooner than it did.

However the alternative to such a Fujimorazo was one of severe government weakness. Between February 1992 and the inauguration of Chávez in February 1999, no Venezuelan government could be confident that it genuinely monopolised force. Caldera did keep the military out of government, but the price for this was slowing reform to a snail’s pace. Meanwhile the former coup-leaders were energetically building up their own political party and planning Chávez’ electoral campaign for 1998. Overall, a mixture of military unrest, a powerful Congress and a generally fragmented political scene made it almost impossible for Caldera to carry out the kind of institutional reform that most Venezuelans evidently wanted.

The dangers of Caldera's co-optative strategy could be seen in late 1998. On 19 October, by which time Hugo Chávez had established a clear lead in the race for the presidency, General Rojas Pérez made some intemperate comments to the effect that the military might not accept a Chávez electoral victory. These remarks nearly provoked a crisis because Chávez still had many supporters within the military. According to Bernardo Alvarez, a member of the Polo Patriotico (28), some of Chávez supporters sought a meeting with General Salazar, at that time Venezuela's military attaché in Washington. Salazar had earlier shown some support for Chávez upon the latter's release from imprisonment and he was widely known to be personally hostile to General Rojas Pérez (confidential interview). According to Alvarez, Salazar responded to the overture from the Polo Patriotico by talking to some US Generals and warning them of a coup attempt. At the same time, he gave the Chavistas some significant information on the identity and disposition of the so-called 'Clan de Los Llanos' (i.e. Rojas Pérez supporters) within the military. Upon receipt of this information, Chávez publicly accused some people in the military of plotting against him. Caldera responded by calling the Generals together and telling them that he would totally oppose any military intervention in the electoral process (29)

It is not clear whether this incident really deserves to be described as a ‘near miss.’ The US military attaché was privately sceptical that a genuine coup attempt was imminent, though he did not rule out the possibility of unrest short of a coup (confidential interview). However the incident does highlight the fact that civilian control over the military after February 1992 was very tenuous. What made it tenuously possible is that both the original coup leaders and the traditional parties both had reasons for not wanting a coup to take place. However what kept democracy in place after February 1992 were factions, instrumentalities and political calculations rather than secure democratic legitimation. Even as things stood, civilian governments were not free to make policy as they wished because of the risk of civil disorder. This was not an institutional climate in which serious reforms could have been attempted.

In the overall context of this discussion, three conclusions seem in order. One is that the February 1992 coup attempt cast a long shadow. The failure to prevent it had far greater and more damaging long-term consequences for the political system than was immediately appreciated. There is a direct and clear line leading from the failure of the dominant parties to maintain an effective system of military intelligence in 1992 to the election of Chávez to the presidency in 1998. A second, more general, point is that civil-military relations did indeed matter. Venezuela is by no means the only country in Latin America in which civilian control over the military cannot just be assumed to exist. (For a recent survey of South America as a whole see Fitch (30)). Admittedly there was in Venezuela is a general perception among military officers that they could no longer simply seize power because of the international isolation which would result. However the fact that an old-fashioned military coup would not have produced a stable authoritarian government in Venezuela did not mean that the military was incapable of playing a political role.

The final conclusion coming out of this discussion has to do with the relationship between law enforcement and the institutionalisation of democracy. We need to understand why Chávez and his allies were not simply dismissed as fanatics and potential dictators, as the democratically elected government expected. The main point here is that the coup-leaders’ rejection of what they saw as a patrimonial and corrupt state struck a real chord with many Venezuelans. Polls show that the majority of Venezuelans disapproved of the methods adopted by the coup leaders but had a lot of sympathy with what Chávez was actually saying (31). Chávez’ later polls victory is further evidence here. For Chávez the February coup attempt was a military defeat but a political victory. According to the coup leaders, Venezuela’s professional politicians had undermined their own right to exact obedience under law by themselves failing to obey, uphold and enforce the law. This viewpoint would not have been as widely accepted as it was if it were not for considerable evidence of lawless behaviour within Venezuela’s political elite.

The Failure of Anti-Corruption Efforts.

Academic observers generally accept the essential accuracy of the popular perception that there was widespread corruption in Venezuela. It is admittedly too simply to portray Venezuela as an honest civil society unaccountably ruled over by a corrupt elite (32). What probably made corruption worse was the 1970s oil boom, followed by the economic decline of the 1980s. Corruption increasingly surfaced as an electoral issue after the mid-1980s, when average living standards declined sharply and politics took on more of a zero-sum character.

However we are concerned here not so much with the fact or even the degree of corruption but rather the inability of the party politicians in the early 1990s to convince Venezuelans that they were doing anything positive to contain it. In other words what the failure of political response. There is nothing inevitable about a failure of democratic politicians to deal with electoral concerns about corruption. In Mexico, the arrest of La Quina in 1989 (no matter how hypocritical in view of the Mexican government's own activities at the time) improved President Salinas' popularity considerably. The subsequent arrest of Raúl Salinas in 1995 was later helpful to Zedillo. Arrests also played a part in restoring some public trust to Italian democracy after earlier scandals -despite problems with convicting some of the most important criminal suspects. Once corruption becomes a political issue it is important that democratic leaders are seen to respond.

It seemed at first as though Venezuelan politicians had learned this lesson from the February 1992 coup. President Pérez immediately sought to negotiate an understanding with Eduardo Fernández, the leader of COPEI. The immediate reaction of both was that the two dominant parties needed to coalesce and negotiate a programme of reform that might restore some credibility to the system. This was an understandable first move. Neither of the major parties wanted a coup, and Fernández was close to business elites who did not a coup either.  Many business leaders, however, were not so much pro-democracy as opposed to Chávez and his Left-wing supporters who were seen as dangerous (33).

It seemed to outside observers, at first, as though a deal had been struck.  Political leaders and business elites would agree to give up their own 'black sheep' if the others did so as well. Pérez then brought independent AD leader Pinerúa Ordaz into the Cabinet with a mandate to crack down on corruption and the previous abuse of power. The rhetoric against political figures perceived as corrupt was then stepped up.  Readers of the Venezuelan press were then led to believe that there would be a number of spectacular arrests which might restore some moral credibility to the system. At the end of March 1992 Fernández publicly called on Pinerúa to start such a crackdown. (34)

However there were cynics.  Luis Matos Azocar, a former teacher of Chávez and a dissident member of AD from which he was in March 1992 in the process of being expelled, gave a press conference to mark his departure from the party. He stated that the Congressional AD, by that time thoroughly alienated from Pérez, would press for the president's resignation if Pinerúa brought any prominent supporters of ex-president Lusinchi to justice. (35). If Lusinchi's supporters were protected, of course, no other party faction would agree to have its own members arrested. In the end Matos proved correct. Anti-corruption measures against individuals were lost in the judicial system and no purge of corrupt individuals took place.

There can be no doubt that this failure was the result of the party establishments looking after their own (36). Senior judges were thoroughly controlled by the party system and could be relied upon to follow the lead of the main party bosses. In March 1992 the Attorney General Ramón Escovar Salom publicly denounced David Morales Bello (at the time a leading member of AD and one of Pérez’ few remaining allies) for running a so-called 'tribe of David' within the judiciary. According to the Escovar Salom, no fewer than twenty-four senior judges were part of Morales Bello's 'tribe' and they protected the political and financial interests of their party-political patrons (37). It is noteworthy that Morales Bello in February 1992 had called for the death penalty to be invoked against Chávez and the other coup leaders -a demand treated with some ridicule in the press (37).

Why was this anti-corruption initiative allowed to peter out? Some well-informed observers claim that corruption had by the 1990s penetrated so deeply within the dominant parties that reform from within had become impossible. For example Jorge Giordani told the author that party leaders at times actively encouraged law breaking among their subordinates as a kind of initiation into serious politics and as a means of guaranteeing their own untouchability if the political climate changed (39). On the rare occasion where an individual was actually punished for corruption (as happened in the case of Pérez himself), this was more of a sanction for a lack of conformity to the system, or for other kinds of difference, than for corruption itself. This view gains credence from the fact that the only criminal conviction in the case of the massive RECADI (foreign exchange) scandal was that of a Chinese restaurant owner.

It is certainly significant that the party leaders, while blocking an anti-corruption drive, were willing to sacrifice Pérez' market-oriented economics programme. They were also willing to sacrifice Pérez himself, who was impeached for corruption by Congress and later gaoled. There is little doubt that Pérez was guilty of corruption, but also little doubt that his removal involved political considerations. Even more to the point, the Pérez impeachment was intended to mark the end of the house cleaning and not the beginning. In the end the party politicians based in Congress were not prepared to sacrifice any of their own. While this might have been understandable in personal terms, it led popular disgust with the parties to increase even more. A kind of high water mark of political insensitivity was reached in July 1993 when a measure was introduced into Congress (though not passed) which would have decriminalised corruption and reduced it to the status of a civil misdemeanour.

All of this tends to reinforce the argument presented above. Patrimonialism undermined the judicial system just as it undermined civilian control over the military. Both were damaging to democracy, although in different ways. An effective state would have prosecuted people thought to have been involved in serious corruption and, by doing so, might have helped restore public confidence in the system. However judicial autonomy (like other aspects of state autonomy) was extremely weak. In principle, state bodies existed which should have been able to arrest a significant number of individuals suspected of corruption. What stood in the way of these arrests were political contacts and clientelistic relationships. No law-enforcing body in Venezuela was genuinely autonomous of the parties, and particularly the Congress-based leaders of these parties.

However, this is not the whole story. The weakness of executive authority was relevant as well, in a way which parallels the story of civil-military relations. If the Venezuelan presidency had been stronger vis-à-vis the party leaderships, then the prospects for reform would have been much better. It is clear that the party elites in Congress took a short-term view of their own interests. They themselves had been elected according to ‘party list’ systems that gave them power without much responsibility. They had more to gain as individuals by a strategy of ‘take the money and run’ than from any strategy of sacrifice and reform. They therefore preferred to protect their core interests even at the price of severely alienating the public. In a system giving more power to a directly-elected president, incentive structures might well have worked differently.

The 1998 Elections

We turn, finally, to the behaviour of the dominant parties during the 1998 elections. These elections provide evidence that the traditional parties had lost the capacity to compete effectively for the national vote. This is also something that had much to do with the diffusion of power within the political system. A genuine ‘winner take all’ majoritarian system quickly eliminates uncompetitive parties and individuals. Under such a system AD and COPEI (particularly AD) would have had to reform quickly and decisively if they were to have any hope of continuing political success. However the Venezuelan system over-recognised AD and (to a lesser extent) COPEI’s political machinery in the more rural states where electability was less closely tied to performance. As a result, the major parties could continue to elect governors and congressmen in certain states and use this power base to manipulate the electoral rules to their own advantage despite their unpopularity nationally. Until a few days before the December 1998 elections, it appeared that this situation was causing a kind of Gramscian crisis.  Traditional forms of politics had lost credibility with the majority of the public while reformers found themselves blocked at every turn by the strength of the dominant parties among more traditional voters. This state of affairs increased the probability that political change, when it came, would be non-evolutionary.

By the mid-1990s the political position of the traditional parties had become tenuous. AD and COPEI no longer controlled the presidency and they needed increasingly to negotiate with minor parties in order to win local and regional elections. After Caldera’s 1993 electoral victory, AD and COPEI fit the description of ‘traditional’ rather than ‘dominant’ parties. Even so it would be wrong to describe their decline as irreversible as of 1993. They still controlled a majority of Congress, most state governorships, much of the state apparatus and a good deal of money. In much of rural Venezuela AD was still the natural majority party. (40).

Moreover President Caldera, though an independent candidate himself, was not hostile to the traditional parties. As we have seen, he turned down a call to close congress in July 1994 and thereafter negotiated with AD’s congressional leaders. He told one close associate at that time that Venezuela needed strong parties and that, since Caldera himself had virtually destroyed COPEI, he wanted to help AD (41). AD’s position of independence and negotiated support for the government initially proved beneficial for the party’s image and AD achieved an improvement in its share of the vote between the 1993 presidential election and the 1995 state governorship elections.

Since the government had no plans to present a candidate in the 1998 elections, AD evidently believed that it stood a chance of victory in these elections. Some outside observers believed this as well. The key problem that AD had to face was candidate selection. The difficulty was that the most respected AD leaders in the eyes of the electorate were not popular within the party apparatus which found them to be excessively independent. There was still the lingering fear that an AD-supported president might allow some people in his own party to be gaoled for corruption.

Meanwhile in 1997 COPEI decided to support the independent candidacy of Irene Saez who was a former beauty queen, an elected mayor of a suburb of Caracas and, when COPEI first decided to support her, the front runner in the presidential polls. Both COPEI and Irene should have been made more cautious by a Datanalisis poll in 1997 which stated that Saez would receive 42% of the vote if she stood as an independent and 35% of the vote if she stood as an independent while accepting COPEI support.

Hugo Chávez declared himself a candidate for the presidency in April 1997 and it was clear by the end of that year that he would poll well. Many voters who had come to dislike the two traditional parties were starting to concentrate behind Chávez. Chávez himself had spent the years following his release from prison building up a relatively small but very serviceable political party of his own. He promised radical Constitutional (as well as social and economic) reform. Essentially he sought to achieve by elective means what he had failed to achieve by force in February 1992. His key promise was to hold a referendum on the setting up of a Constituent Assembly to replace Congress and rewrite the Constitution.  Since there was no Constitutional provision for this, it was clear that he was using the presidential election campaign not merely to win the presidency but to seek a mandate to overthrow the entire Constitutional order. Chávez also promised unremitting hostility to the leaders of AD and COPEI and stated that he would dismantle the patronage state which the two main parties had so extensively built up over the years.

While Chávez attracted some significant support, he faced a great deal of opposition as well. This was an election in which much was evidently at stake, not least for the traditional parties themselves. COPEI had weakened considerably by 1998 but AD retained a good deal of support. If that party had nominated a popular candidate and made a credible promise to reform, then it must have had a chance of victory. However AD nominated Alfaro Ucero for the presidency, despite overwhelming survey evidence that his candidature would be unattractive to many Venezuelans. Alfaro was a political boss within AD, outside whose ranks he was almost universally regarded as a political dinosaur and an obstacle to reform.

Once it became clear that their presidential candidates were languishing in the polls, AD and COPEI sought to manipulate election procedures to their own advantage. In July 1998 congress was persuaded to pass a law to change the date of governorship and congressional elections from December to November. One transparent purpose of this change was to enable AD and perhaps COPEI to use their stronger machines to poll well in November and thereby strike a psychological blow ahead of the December elections. They would also hope to retain control of congress even in the event of losing presidential elections. Given that the existing Venezuelan Constitution gave considerable powers to congress vis-à-vis the presidency, this might have seemed a plausible strategy. What it failed to take into consideration, however, was that Chávez was always likely to interpret a presidential victory as a mandate to change the Constitution.

At first, AD’s plan went according to schedule. In the November elections AD gained some 24% of the vote and COPEI around 11%. While these figures were relatively disappointing, and possibly inflated by some fraud, they were not a disaster. As November wore on, however, it became clear that the vast majority of those who had voted for AD or COPEI in November would not do so in December. Almost all of the later polls put Chávez in first place, the Right-wing independent candidate Salas Romer in second place with Alfaro and Saez far behind. On 27 November El Nacional published a Datanalisis poll giving Chávez 46%, Salas 38%, Alfaro 7%, Saez 3% and all others plus 'won't say' respondents 6%. At this point the AD hierarchy held a meeting and after acrimonious debate (which included an exchange of blows, captured by a press photographer) agreed to expel Alfaro from the party and switch the support of the party to Salas. A few days later COPEI, somewhat more decorously, also dumped Saez for Salas. After years of complacency, the traditional parties at the end dropped their original strategies as part of a panicky ‘stop-Chávez’ manoeuvre.

In the event this manoeuvre failed completely. Chávez won the elections with 56% of the vote; Salas Romer received 39%. There were other candidates whose vote was insignificant. It is always slightly risky to extrapolate from opinion polls to actual elections, but a later Datanalisis poll on 4 December proved highly accurate. If we assume that the 27 November poll was accurate as well, then we can consider what happened to the AD and COPEI vote in the last week of the campaign.

The particular characteristics of the Venezuelan ballot paper also help us here (42). According to Venezuelan law, if more than one party supports a candidate then that candidate can appear on the ballot paper more than once. Because AD's decision to support Salas came too late for the Alfaro/AD box to be removed from the ballot paper (the same being true of the COPEI/Saez box), all votes cast for Alfaro/AD were tabulated separately before being allocated to Salas. We therefore know that the AD vote was just over 7%, which was very much in line with earlier polls. Because Alfaro also enjoyed the support of several minor parties, his name remained on the ballot paper despite the withdrawal of AD support: only 0.32% of the electorate eventually voted for him. There is therefore clear evidence that AD's loyal support, some 7% of the electorate, did vote as their leaders instructed.  COPEI’s support had by then weakened even more. Only 1.7% of the electorate marked the Saez/COPEI box (i.e. voting for Salas) while 3.4% of the electorate voted for Saez despite COPEI’s manoeuvre. A further 31% of the electorate voted directly for Salas, giving him a total of 39%. This 31% was well down on the 39% who had announced an intention to vote for Salas in the 27 November poll. The other 8% had, presumably, switched their votes to Chávez in order to distance themselves from a candidate supported by AD and COPEI.

This AD/COPEI manoeuvre rather summed up the entire history of both parties, particularly AD, during the 1990s. It was cynical, it was unsuccessful and it was counter-productive. Alfaro was clearly the wrong presidential candidate from an electoral point of view, since his nomination responded to party rather than electoral logic. However the decision to dump him looked cynical and panicky. The withdrawal of support from Alfaro and Saez failed because (as it appears) a significant number of voters switched from Salas to Chávez out of disgust with what they probably saw as a Salas pact with the traditional parties. Chávez during the last week of campaigning launched a fierce attack on Salas for accepting the support of the traditional parties.
 
If AD had nominated a popular candidate early in 1998, it would surely have polled at least as well as the AD Congressional vote in November (24% of the vote). This would surely have been enough to deny Chávez an absolute majority. Even if AD and COPEI had kept faith with Alfaro and Saez until the end, it seems likely that Chávez would have won the presidency without an absolute majority. In view of Chávez promise to change the Constitution, the difference between a plurality and a majority might have been important. In such a case AD would probably have retained at least a negotiating position vis-à-vis the incoming president. So why did they perform so ineptly?

As was the case with the non-anticipation of the Chávez coup attempt, the question of human error is tied up with the broader question of system failure. Incompetence can of course occur even in well-run systems, and every human being makes mistakes. However it does seem remarkable that the AD leadership during 1998 showed so little understanding of the needs and desires of the Venezuelan electorate. It does seem reasonable to conclude that the original checks-and-balances system had, in the absence of an autonomous state, deteriorated into a spoils system. Participation in the spoils system was damaging in two respects. It alienated the public and it made the parties less capable of fighting elections effectively. A warning from the electorate should have been taken in 1993 when the traditional parties lost a considerable share of the vote. However far from learning about the importance of electability, the AD leadership settled down to a cosy world of political negotiations. When forced again in 1998 to compete for the popular vote against a charismatic outsider they had no answer.

Politicians and the State in Venezuela: Some Conclusions

The Venezuelan public clearly withdrew support from the country’s political institutions during the 1990s (43). It is important to note that this did not imply any rejection of democracy as such but rather of a particular institutional representation of a democratic idea. However this institutional expression, involving non-ideological parties, a powerful congress and a concept of checks and balances, was one which many political scientists have recommended for Latin America. Yet it did not perform well in Venezuela, and the motives for the popular rejection of the parties, at an empirical level, are not hard to find. Nobody likes political leaders who are corrupt, remote and incompetent. At a more conceptual level, we need to ask why this outcome should have occurred. Three conclusions are suggested here.

We still have more to learn about the relationship between elective institutions and state institutions in general but it does seem that there was something wrong in the Venezuelan case. The point is that the Venezuelan ‘pacted’ democratic system suffered from a design failure. This design failure had to do with the absence of effective mechanisms to limit corruption and the abuse of power. Fundamentally this was a problem of the state,

The second conclusion is that party-state relationships have, at least in this case, been under-researched in the ‘democratisation’ literature: this literature tends to regard the holding of free and fair elections as the ultimate aim of institution-building. However the Venezuelan experience leaves one in no doubt that regular, contested elections are not guaranteed to produce an impartial or even a respected state. Institutional party-state relationships need to be considered separately from voting behaviour. The existence of a state that is systematically biased toward political incumbents is at best damaging to the legitimacy of democratic institutions and at worst destructive of them.

Thirdly, it should be evident that any political system needs to have the means of reforming itself and correcting its own failures from within. Too much pluralism can make evolutionary reform difficult. Some of Venezuela’s institutional problems seem to have been the unintended by-products of a democratic system consciously designed to reflect ‘checks and balances’. Without serious law-enforcement, there a danger that such a system will produce immobilism until a violent shock can no longer be avoided. Where democracies do suffer from serious institutional problems, vigorous majoritarian politics with a powerful executive may provide a much-needed channel for reform. If the system blocks the political expression of majoritarianism, then it may ultimately put itself in danger. In the end, in Venezuela, the desire for accountable government took priority over the desire for Constitutional government. In the end the people did want strong leadership in order to limit abuses, and they found a way of voting for it.

A note on interviews.

The author conducted interviews relating to the political role of the Venezuelan military and the structure of politics generally, during research trips in September 1990, March 1992, April 1997, December 1998 and April 1999. Those interviewed sometimes requested confidentiality. Where they did not do so, their names have been given in the appropriate footnotes

Footnotes.

M. Naim Paper Tigers and Minotaurs. M. Rodriguez ‘Comment’ in J. Williamson Ed. The Political Economy of Policy Reform (Institute for International Economics, Washington D.C., 1993)
 M. Kornblith and D. Levine 'Venezuela: The Life and Times of the Party System' pp.37-72 in Mainwaring and Scully Building Democratic Institutions 1995 p.69
M. Coppedge “Venezuela, Democratic despite Presidentialism’ in J. Linz and A. Valenzuela Eds. The Failure of Presidential Democracy: Vol.2 The Case of Latin America (Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 1994).
P. Schmitter, G. O’Donnell, and L. Whitehead Eds. Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 1986)
B. Crisp ‘Presidential Behaviour in a System with Strong Parties: Venezuela 1958-1995’ in S. Mainwaring and M. Shugart Eds. Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America (Johns Hopkins, 1997).
J Linz 'Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy: Does it Make a Difference?' 3-91 in J.Linz and A. Valenzuela Eds. The Failure of Presidential Democracy: the case of Latin America
T. Landman ‘Economic Development and Democracy: the view from Latin America’ Political Studies vol. 47 no. 4 (September 1999).
A. Templeton 'The Evolution of Popular Opinion' 79-114 in Louis Goodman et.al. Eds. Lessons of the Venezuelan Experience (Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington 1995)
9.  Levine ‘Paradigm Lost: Dependency to Democracy’ World Politics Vol. 40 No. 3
10. T. Karl The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States (University of California, 1997).
11.  J. Linz, ‘The Failure of Presidential Democracy’ See also World Bank World Development Report 1997 (Oxford University Press, 1997).
12.  Interview with Miguel Rodriguez, April 1992
13. Interview with Gerver Torres 27 March 1992
14. A. Muller Rojas Relaciones Peligrosas: Militares, Politica y Estado (UCV, Caracas 1992)
15. A.Zago La Rebelion de los Angeles: Reportaje, los Documentos del Movimiento (Warp, Caracas,1998). Agustin Blanco Munoz Ed.  Habla el Comandante: Testimonios Violentes  (Caracas, Pablo Neruda, 1998)
16. Zago ibid.
17 Habla el Comandante p.133
18. W. Burggraaff and R. Millett 54-78 in Goodman Ed. Lessons of the Venezuelan Experience
19. Interview with Luis Castro Leyva 3 April 1992
20. Habla el Comandante pp.164-65
J Buxton 'The Venezuelan Party System 1988-1995 with Reference to the Rise and Decline of Radical Cause' PhD. University of London 1998
A. Angell and C Graham ‘Can Social Sector Refrom Make Adjustment More Stable and Equitable? Lessons from Chile and Venezuela ‘ Journal of Latin American Studies Vol. 27 no. 1 1995 pp.189-219
Interview with Hilarion Cardozo, Caracas, September 1990
Habla el Comandante p.164-65
25. Interview with Luis Castro Leyva 20 April 1997, and with Teodoro Petkoff 7 December 1998
25. Interview with Dr Rodriguez Iturbe, 16 April 1997
26. Interview with Luis Castro Leyva 20 April 1997
27. Interview with Dr Rodriguez Iturbe 16 April 1997
28. Interview with Bernardo Alvarez, Caracas, 30 November 1998
29. Interview with Teodoro Petkoff, Caracas, 7 December 1998
30.  J.S Fitch The Armed Forces and Democracy in Latin America (Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 1998)
31. Templeton ‘The Evolution of Public Opinion.’ Sic February 1992.
32. A. Romero 'Rearranging the Deckchairs on the Titanic' Latin American Research Review 1997
33.  Interview with Anibal Romero 3 April 1992
34.   El Universal 1 April 1992
35.   El Universal 1 April 1992
36. W. Little and A. Herrera 'Political Corruption in Venezuela' pp.267-287 in W. Little and E. Posada-Carbo Political Corruption in Europe and Latin America (ILAS, london, 1996),
37.   El Universal 26 March 1992
38.   Muller Rojas (1992) p.101
39.  Interview with Jorge Giordani 2 December 1998.

From website Defeat of representative democracy

Buxton ‘The Venezuelan Party System’
Interview with Luis Castro Leyva 16 April 1997
The author was an accredited international observer of the December 1998 elections. This section is largely based on his observations together with the official election results.
Templeton ‘The Evolution of Public Opinion’

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