The Survivalist Equilibrium: Venezuela in the Post-Chavez Era

• In Event: The Decay of the Pink Tide and the Rise of the Right in Latin America

Abstract

Over the past three decades a substantial body of research has been conducted on political transitions, with a majority of scholarship focusing on processes of democratization (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Linz 1996; Sørensen 1993). Another strain of scholarship has emerged as an offshoot of this research agenda, centering more specifically on democratic decay and how erstwhile liberal regimes regress into autocracy (Tilly 2003; Diamond 1999). However, one common conclusion found throughout these connected yet distinct literatures is the assumption that political transitions are often caused by poor economic performance, combined with pressures from above and/or below (Wood 2000). Whereas democratic systems ostensibly are better equipped to absorb such pressures through free and fair elections and institutional checks and balances, authoritarian regimes are assumed to be more susceptible to these forces. Yet a persistent enigma remains, namely how do such illiberal regimes maintain power in the face of massive economic crises, eroding domestic support, increased regional and international isolation, or a combination of all three?

This paper aims to address the above question by providing a historical-institutional analysis of Venezuela, a country that has experienced transitions to and from authoritarian rule. This analysis draws on the political economy literature on transitions by maintaining that the embeddedness of political and economic structures creates the institutional determinants of both transition and continuity in political regimes (North, Wallis, Webb and Weingast 2013). In the Venezuelan case, the oil-based rentier economy established during the first half of the twentieth century has conditioned both political institutions and the structuration of the ruling coalition (Karl 1997, Corrales 2014). This conforms with other work which finds that oil-based rentierism hinders democratic transitions (Chaudhry 1997; Ross 2001; Gause 1994). Nevertheless, the literature does not explain how certain regimes avoid political transitions – even those which are to some degree authoritarian – as institutional conditions change drastically. According to conventional wisdom, the collapse in international oil prices at the end of 2014 should have weakened the power of competitive authoritarian and authoritarian regimes found in Venezuela and elsewhere in the world (Diamond 2010). Yet strangely, this did not occur.

In an attempt to explain this phenomenon, we hypothesize that the Venezuelan political system entered what we term a “survivalist equilibrium” beginning in late 2015. The survivalist equilibrium refers to when an incumbent regime prioritizes its own survival (e.g. staying in power) over the hitherto established rules of the game that made the political system electorally competitive in relative terms. These rules also include honoring commitments to the same prior standard of social provision for its citizens, and the effective management and redistribution of its economic resources. Crucially, a regime finds itself in such equilibrium when economic conditions prove unable to sustain the large clientelistic networks that made electoral competition previously possible, and thus the ruling coalition opts for overt electoral manipulation and increased repression as an alternative. Of equal importance, the costs of political transition and/or a negotiated exit are unbearably high (e.g. death, prison, or exile) and thus are not viable options for members of the ruling coalition.

By developing this important concept in the study of political transitions, this article challenges other explanations that cite the absence of Hugo Chávez and his charismatic ruling style, or the incompetence of the current ruling coalition (Buxton 2017; Carmen and Rogoff 2014; Obuchi, Abadí, and Lira 2011). We demonstrate that while Maduro and other influential figures within his government do possess a constricted sense of agency, the configuration of the ruling coalition which he inherited from Hugo Chávez in 2013 is structured in such a manner as to prevent either economic reform or a negotiated exit from power given current oil prices and external sanctions. Therefore, for lack of any other available option this regime has clearly decided that the only rational decision is to escalate its commitment to previous policy failures, simultaneously restricting increasingly scarce public resources solely to loyalists while closing off all avenues for potential dissent.

Author

• Charles Larratt-Smith, University of Toronto