The Authoritarian Divide: Populism, Propaganda, and Polarization by Orçun Selçuk

Author:Orçun Selçuk [Selçuk, Orçun]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International, Political Science, Modern, Foreign Legal Systems, Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, History
ISBN: 9780268208066
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2024-07-14T23:00:00+00:00

Although Chávez successfully used oil revenues for the purposes of material inclusion at home and abroad, the clientelistic nature of these policies led to unequal distribution of resources and even retribution on opponents. The most blatant form of material exclusion15 occurred through the creation of a list of citizens who had legally signed the petitions to revoke Chávez’s mandate ahead of the 2004 recall referendum. The official justification for creating the Tascón List and then Maisanta database was to prevent fraud so that people whose signatures were forged could remove their names. According to Carroll, in practice, the list was used by the incumbent government and state officials “to purge signatories from the state payroll, to deny jobs, contracts, loans, documents, to harass and punish, to make sectarianism official. People lost careers and livelihoods and went bankrupt. Fear gripped those who had signed, then it spread to their relatives” (Carroll 2013, 157). Even though Chávez dismissed those accusations on the show as “an invention of the bourgeoisie and the squalid ones” (episode 365), a quantitative study that matched the Maisanta dataset and the Venezuelan Household Survey found that the signers of the petition against the president “experienced a 5 percent drop in earnings and a 1.5 percent drop in employment rates after the voter list was released” (Hsieh et al. 2011, 196). Blacklisting citizens who oppose the government is not unique to Venezuela, and it is a common practice of clientelism and/or authoritarianism elsewhere. In the Turkish case, following the 2016 coup attempt, through emergency decrees President Erdoğan quickly purged thousands of people from the military, police, judiciary, academia, and bureaucracy because of their alleged ties to the Gülen movement, indicating the presence of a blacklist, albeit not a public one as in the Venezuelan case. What makes Venezuela stand out is the overt nature of material exclusion, publicly delineating the boundaries of affective leader polarization.

Another way Chávez materially rewarded his supporters was through facilitating corruption and criminal self-enrichment. As in many other Latin American countries, corrupt practices had existed in Venezuela for decades and contributed to the downfall of the two-party system and to the rise of a populist outsider. Despite his promise to end corruption in the country, under Chávez’s presidency a new group of Venezuelans close to the government emerged as the main beneficiaries of the unprecedented oil boom and the statist model of development (Coronel 2006). In the absence of transparency and accountability, under chavismo organized crime and state institutions became intertwined (Tablante and Tarre 2013). Groups of individuals who worked in the military, the judiciary, state-owned companies, and various bureaucratic agencies enriched themselves through illicit activities, such as “smuggling of food, medicines, weapons, obtaining illegal profits from the currency exchange control system, and drug trafficking” (López Maya 2018, 68). Summarized succinctly, “The emergence of this Bolibourgeoisie reproduced existing structural tendencies towards inefficiency and corruption, while creating new hierarchies of wealth and influence” (Buxton 2020, 1381). Table 4.3 lays out how Chávez materially included his followers

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