Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 79, octubre de 2005 | 105 In Search of a Theory of Polarization: Lessons from Venezuela, 1999-2005

The Hugo Chávez Frías administration (1999-present) is the most polarizing gov-ernment in Venezuela since the late 1940s and in Latin America as a whole since the Sandinistas ruled Nicaragua in the 1980s. Supporters admire Chávez for having inaugurated a new form of democracy, so-called ‘participatory’, which is unabash-edly anti-party and presumably more attuned to ordinary citizens. They also admire his call for an alternative economic model, a ‘socialism of the 21st century’, which is decidedly anti-globalization and pro-poor, at least in words. For critics, these are pretty-sounding slogans intended to disguise a new form of authoritarianism – one that uses democratic instruments (electoral majorities) to produce undemocratic outcomes (exclusion of political opponents). Each side sees the other as politically threatening. The disputes between them plunged Venezuela into new levels of po-litical instability. Venezuela in the 1970s was considered a paradigmatic case for the study of democratization, and in the 1980s, for the study of democratic decay. In the 1990s, it became a paradigmatic case for the study of policy incoherence. In the early 2000s, it has emerged as a paradigmatic case for the study of politica