Thwarting Electoral Revolution: The Communal State and Authoritarian Consolidation in Venezuela
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In 2017, Venezuela appeared to be on the brink of democratic transition. After former president Hugo Chavez’s death and amid a crippling humanitarian crisis, Venezuela’s quasi-authoritarian regime lost in the country’s 2015 parliamentary elections. According to studies on rapid transitions out of autocracy, the electoral defeat, combined with deteriorating socioeconomic conditions and prolonged social unrest in 2016 and 2017, should have resulted in democratic transition. Today, however, Venezuela remains under the regime’s control and continues to sink deeper into authoritarianism. This thesis argues that the Venezuelan regime’s political survival was the result of two strategies for authoritarian consolidation that began developing once Chavez came to power in 1999. The first was a military strategy focused on maintaining the Armed Forces’ loyalty and protecting against popular mobilization. The second was a bottom-up strategy centered on a series of communal governance structures that later evolved into mechanisms for social control. The gradual development of these consolidation strategies over the years is what ultimately allowed the Venezuelan regime to thwart democratic transition in 2017.
Description
Type of resource | text |
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Date created | May 2019 |
Creators/Contributors
Author | Trivella, Alexander | |
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Primary advisor | Magaloni, Beatriz | |
Advisor | Trinkunas, Harold | |
Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law |
Subjects
Subject | Competitive Authoritarianism |
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Subject | Authoritarian Consolidation |
Subject | Venezuela |
Subject | Hugo Chavez |
Subject | Nicolas Maduro |
Subject | Electoral Revolution |
Subject | Communal State |
Subject | Estado Comunal |
Subject | Communal Councils |
Subject | Communal Governance |
Subject | Center on Democracy Development and the Rule of Law |
Subject | CDDRL |
Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Trivella, Alexander. (2019). Thwarting Electoral Revolution: The Communal State and Authoritarian Consolidation in Venezuela. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/xr216rc9013
Collection
Stanford University, Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law
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- Contact
- atrivell@stanford.edu
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