New Frontiers

Charlotte Tate: From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, the Center’s Associate Director. In this episode, Mark Williams speaks with Javier Corrales about the state of democracy in Venezuela today, the forces behind its democratic decline, and how those same forces could affect other democratic political systems.

Mark Williams: Javier Corrales is the Dwight W. Morrow 1895 Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. A long time scholar of Venezuelan politics, his latest book is Autocracy Rising, How Venezuela Transitioned to Authoritarianism. It's published by the Brookings Institution. Before the 2024 elections, Javier visited Middlebury where he spoke about the fate of Venezuelan democracy and the lessons its slide into autocracy might teach us about the life and death of democratic governments writ large.
Given this topic's importance, I'm delighted to have him as a guest for this episode so that we can discuss it in greater detail. Javier Corrales, welcome to New Frontiers.

Javier Corrales: Thank you so much, Mark. Glad to be here.

Mark Williams: We're glad to have you. Venezuela once was quite democratic with a fairly regular rotation of power between different parties. Can you describe how Venezuelan democracy first came about and worked before it began this slide into autocracy that so concerns you?

Javier Corrales: Yes, I would say that Venezuela's democracy was impressively democratic for regional and even Global South standards. Democracy emerged in the late 1950s at a time when very few Latin American countries and very few recently independent countries in Africa were turning democratic.
Of course, if you compare it to the standard of some of the most advanced-economy democracies of the time, Venezuela had problems, but again given its peers the kind of democracy that Venezuela had was pretty robust. You had rotation in office. You had competitive elections. You have a significant degree of pluralism, a remarkable degree of respect for freedoms. Obviously, there were issues of economic distribution and not everybody got to participate equally but again relative to what the alternatives were, which was closed autocracies or insurrectionist unstable regimes, Venezuela really was a remarkable place from about the early 60s until the early 90s.

Mark Williams: So it was an outlier in terms of the regional.

Javier Corrales: Yes, I mean, for Latin America, there were only two other cases, Costa Rica and Colombia. And Colombia's democracy was probably not that profound. But yeah, it was a bit of an outlier. It was also a bit of an outlier for oil states, very few of which to this day are democratic.

Mark Williams: If we were to think about democracy on a scale where one would represent an enfeebled democracy or an illiberal democracy and ten would represent a full liberal democracy, where would you place Venezuela today? What features of the political system also would lead you to place it?
Javier Corrales: If zero is a totalitarian regime, certainly Venezuela is not there just yet. But it is very low. I mean I think if I use a conventional index, it's probably around two out of ten. But zero being a very, almost nobody gets that score. And this is an interesting point to make, which is, in the 21st century, we're not seeing the reversion toward totalitarian types of autocracy. Even a very repressive autocracy like Venezuela's will maintain a certain degree of openness. Now, many members of the opposition in Venezuela will tell you it's totalitarian one way or another, but I think we have had a not too long ago examples of autocratic regimes that were far more draconian. So there are some spaces available and those spaces are often used, or not, by opponents of the regime still.

Mark Williams: So if Venezuela is in your estimation a two on the democratic scale, how does your book explain this descent into autocracy? What happened to Venezuela's democracy?

Javier Corrales: So, the book tries to explain what I think are the two important phases of this process. The first phase is when Venezuela's democracy begins to experience more conventional forms of democratic erosion before going all the way to full autocracy, this early phase. And then, the complete transition to authoritarianism is a bit more special in the sense of there are fewer cases of democratic backsliders that move all the way to full autocracy. So it's based on these two phases. But I try to use the same variables to explain how Venezuela navigated through this journey.

Mark Williams: Intrigued by the idea of a two-staged slide into autocracy, I asked Javier if he could elaborate on this process a bit more.

Javier Corrales: So in the very beginning, what you get is the typical situation of a democracy that's under a significant degree of stress. This is typical. Many democracies go through economic crisis. Venezuela's economic crisis was especially bad. It had a crisis in its forms of representation and it needed to renew itself. And then it elected a populist leader who was incredibly popular. His name was Hugo Chavez and he came in with a discourse that we needed to basically take power away from all the political institutions that were in place.

Rather than reform them, it was sort of like, let me basically leave them without any kind of power. So we need a new constitution. We need a new congress. We have to attack heavily the old political parties.
And people were very excited about that. They were so fed up with 15 years of a democracy that was malfunctioning. And they were like, yeah, we're ready to get rid of them all. And then he replaced them with institutions that were completely controlled by himself or his fellow party members. And once those institutions were in place, it became very easy for this ruling party to then close the regime further and further, give more powers to the president, more impunity to the ruling party, and fewer spaces for opponents.

So that was the first phase, this combination of a new populist leader who comes with a lot of electoral force, a very united political party, who then in the first year and a half in office ensures that all the other institutions, including political parties and institutions of representation, were left almost without oxygen to survive. And once he had that, it was a bit easier for him to proceed.

Mark Williams: So by institutions, you're talking about the legislature, the judiciary, the press?

Javier Corrales: Yes, so you begin by changing the constitution in a big way. Change in the constitution that doesn't give you autocracy, but gives you plenty of powers for the president to then change other things. Then you get rid of the senate and you create a new congress. And this constitution takes a lot of power away from opposition parties, political organizations, you eliminate state funding, and then you create a new party of individuals who are basically followers of the president. Hugo Chavez was able to create a very personalistic party that way, which then controls the new congress.

And from that moment on they begin to pass legislation that was always very self-serving for the ruling party. After that you go after the court. By the third year in office the government was able to pack the courts and basically populate the courts with ruling party members who were openly, openly committed to the presidency, not the rule of law.

And then you do the same with the body that controls elections. All of this is happening and then you also begin to populate the bureaucracy and especially the oil company. But all other form parts of the bureaucracy that control society and regulation and the way that states organize economic activities.

Mark Williams: The oil company being the primary revenue generator for the state.

Javier Corrales: In Venezuela there is only one industry that generates exports and therefore dollars. And so this is owned by the state. So in an oil state like Venezuela, if the president has enormous leeway in running the affairs of the oil company, that's a lot of power because it comes with a lot of economic resources. So yes, but it wasn't just the only one. It was also the law enforcement part of the bureaucracy, the education system, the regulation, the ministry of taxation, and of course, the security apparatus.

Mark Williams: So part of your argument is the emergence of a dominant ruling party that holds sway over the system and is able, from that vantage point, to remold the system. What's happening with those who might oppose the party?

Javier Corrales: So in the very beginning, they weren't able to maintain unity through political organizations. The parties that were in existence prior to Chavez all disappeared and collapsed. And what was left behind was a disorganized opposition that was very large. They were very angry, very mobilized, but they were splintered into multiple little parties and they began to have enormous disagreements about what do we do with this new threat to our existence. Some were on the left, some were on the right, some wanted more street protests, some wanted negotiating with the government. So there was quite a bit of disorganization in the very beginning and a lot of anger and a lot of fear and a lot of protests. It's galvanized big time, very energized, very angry and very mobilized, but very disorganized politically.

Mark Williams: Unable to capitalize.

Javier Corrales: Unable to come together and form a unified resistance. This is the situation up until about 2006 more or less; the opposition eventually begins to recover but in the very beginning this disarray was a great political advantage for Hugo Chavez. He was able to take advantage of the space provided by an opposition that was really unable to get its act together other than to protest.
Mark Williams: Because people might naturally associate political violence and repression with a shift toward autocratic rule, I wondered if this were true for Venezuela. Had the Chavez government used political repression in this early phase to ensure the transition to autocracy would succeed? I put this question to Javier.

Javier Corrales: During this early stage, you're not going to see the military out there arresting individuals or the state banning political activity. What you get is what I call autocratic legalism, which is a mechanism through which the state, through congress or the courts, generating laws that are very draconian, huge restrictions, heavy regulations on the things you can and cannot do. And the state begins to enforce these laws in a very skewed manner, targeting opponents. So you're going to have very draconian laws against corruption. And then you will apply them to opposition groups or corporations. Very strict rules about paying your taxes. And then you would do serious audits of business groups that you find to be in opposition. And you then apply them in a very lax manner to any group that is willing to go along with you. This is what we call autocratic legalism. And this is the way that the repression begins in the very beginning. And it's very effective.

Mark Williams: So it's repression through legal means.

Javier Corrales: Yes, it's repression, but it's not armed forces showing up rounding people up and firing at protesters. There is a lot less of that in the early stages.

Mark Williams: Okay, so we're talking about Venezuela and we're also more or less talking about a transition to authoritarianism in the abstract. And so I'm wondering once a government reaches the point where it is a full fledged autocracy, how does it behave? In what ways is it distinct from what we might see before?

Javier Corrales: So two things. Yes, at this point, you will see the more promiscuous use of old-fashioned repression–the deployment of official acts of physical force against opponents, arresting people arbitrarily. There are no search warrants, they go into people's homes and take you away. So, that traditional form of repression occurs and once you lose democracy you're going to get a significant degree of arbitrariness and overuse of physical force. We also see some innovations that we might not have seen so much in the 20th century.

For example, the government will work with paramilitary groups to help with the dirty work. These would be individuals who are doing the work of repression, but they're not wearing an official uniform. So there is no way that you could say the state is doing this. But they are encouraged by the government to go out into the streets and harass protesters or people who are just involved in politics. So members of political parties wearing civilian clothes, showing up, looking like they're just criminals. Looking like they're just bullies, gangsters, but they're targeting opponents.

And what's interesting about these paramilitaries is how do they get paid? What's their reward? And the deal that the government makes with them is “Please harass them. Do that for me and feel free to loot away, feel free to engage in whatever you need to do to walk out of this with some kind of a reward.” So they steal, they enter businesses, they take property away from you and they are modern day pirates. We're seeing a lot of this, not just in Venezuela. But we see this in many new autocracies, this sort of like outsourcing of violence but also the sponsoring of criminality to go along with autocracy.

We used to think that an autocracy would come in and use force in order to generate order, pacify. But, in many ways, the process of autocratizing, under Maduro, encourages the state to foment all forms of violence and criminality, which is the opposite of order, and the opposite of pacification of society.

Mark Williams: You lose the rule of law in ways that are new under this kind of autocracy.

Javier Corrales: Absolutely.

Mark Williams: So this brings up the issue of economics, and I wanted to circle back to that because you had mentioned Venezuela went through a period of economic distress at the dawn of its movement away from democracy. And I'm curious, can you talk a little bit more about how economic factors in the Venezuelan case or others that you've studied play into the shift away from democracy? And currently under autocracy in Venezuela, can you speak a little bit about the economic effects of this form of government?

Javier Corrales: Sure. A very important part of the study of democratic erosion and the rise of semi autocracy, when a president is destroying the institutions of checks and balance and concentrating power, one of the things that they must be able to do is to deliver what I call crowd pleasing policies. Not on every front, but at least they need to be able to deliver something that the public really cherishes.
In the case of Venezuela, what the government did was to deliver a significant degree of social spending between 2003 and about 2014. The process of backsliding in Venezuela was helped by a remarkable commodity boom of 2003 to 2013, which impacted every commodity exporting country in the world. And Venezuela is one of them. It exports oil. So the price of oil goes up enormously as does the price of many other mineral products, land based products. So every exporting country doing natural extraction is benefiting from this. So this is happening in Venezuela and what the government does is, it begins to use a lot of this for a major expansion in fiscal spending and consumption.

So this allowed a lot of people in Venezuela, but also abroad to congratulate the president because the president was able to come across as a person who was spending on the poor. And he was spending on the poor. And it allowed him to get a lot of people who are very apologetic as the regime was concentrating more power, becoming more arbitrary, engaging in more autocratic legalism. The crowd pleasing part of the regime was still very salient and people were like, we love this and therefore we can live with a little bit of dictatorship. This economic condition disappeared very quickly in 2013. And when that happened, the economy collapsed in a way that almost no other commodity exporting country collapsed. Which tells you how poorly managed the economy was run, because many countries experienced a similar type of collapse. But Venezuela’s economic crisis by 2014,15 was incredibly profound. And it has never really recovered from that point to this day.

Mark Williams: This tactic of employing a crowd pleasing policy sure seems like smart politics. But it made me wonder, what kinds of policies might actually fit this bill? For example, to be politically effective, does a pleasing policy have to yield some clear, tangible benefits, or could a pleasing policy promise that delivered no tangible goodies at all work just as well? I asked Javier to elaborate on this a bit.

Javier Corrales: It can be both, and we can see both. We have found that it helps if you have the money to provide tangible goodies. But if you don't even have those, or if you don't want to spend those, you can provide intangible, crowd pleasing things. I think scholars of populism today have been able to explain very well that you can create cultural promises that are crowd pleasing enough and that make people feel very reassured.

Let me give you an example that both left wing and right wing populists use. You make people feel very threatened by some action. It could be capitalism if you're from the left, or it could be immigrants, for example, if you're from the right. And so you create a sense of threat. You talk about the nation being besieged. You talk about our existence being attacked from these sources and then you design policies that appear like they are containing the threat. And this is a form of reassurance that occurs without you having to spend a lot of money. We could call it threat inflation. You engage in threat inflation and then you come out and bill yourself as, “I am the one who's going to save you from this threat that you're feeling.”

Mark Williams: One can think of a number of examples of this sort of manufacturing of a threat. Immigration in this country, in Europe, right? It could be an internal threat. It’s those people over there however one wants to define those people. The groups change, you know, but the tactic is very similar. I see that happening in the United States. I see it happening in Europe. I see it happening elsewhere.

Javier Corrales: It is the favorite tactic of populist parties. The populist parties, what they do is say, “the majority of us, the good citizens of the country are feeling a threat from a small group of folks who have some privileged position to attack us from.” It could be economic elites, but sometimes it doesn't have to be economic elites. It could be immigrants who are being granted asylum. And so the laws are placing them in some kind of privileged position. It could be intellectuals at universities who are protected by tenure. It could be Hollywood celebrities who have this privileged life. So it's the idea that there's a small few, small number of folks who have some kind of privileged position–it doesn't have to be wealth– that are taking advantage of the facilities that our system provides to then threaten us, threaten the ways of our culture, our life, our practices, and that we have to somehow regulate that.

Mark Williams: So it's not necessarily even a tangible deliverable that a populist leader provides. It can be a psychological or an emotional deliverable that they provide. I'll build you a wall, which I won't build.

Javier Corrales: Which I won't build and you know.

Mark Williams: And which won't work.

Javier Corrales: Which won't work. But you appear as a champion of threat mitigation. And that may be enough. That may be enough fuel. Also, when you engage in threat inflation, you create the impression that any political actor that does not identify the threat as a threat is going to appear as a threat as well. So you create the impression that the other side who is not vilifying the threat that you're talking about is also a potential threat because they're going to be very lax about that threat. It's a remarkably rewarding policy for an autocrat to engage in threat inflation

Mark Williams: What's the most surprising finding that your research on Venezuela's experience has produced? What stuck out to you the most about your project?

Javier Corrales: So I think the most surprising finding is how once you have this institutional control, this combination of a multiplicity of physical force with criminal activity and heightened autocratic legalism, how easy it is for you to survive economic duress. How trying to punish this regime by inflicting economic pain through sanctions really doesn't help, doesn't do the job. They manage to survive so they have a significant degree of resilience. In part because they actually take economic recessions and use them to their advantage.

The second thing that surprised me, Mark, is the resilience of the opposition in Venezuela. I wish other cases undergoing autocratic transitions–I don't want to say they repeat the Venezuelan case–but many times, many times, the regimes completely destroy the opposition. They pacify the country to a point where the opposition has to stay quiet, leave the country and put up with this.

Mark Williams: They become docile.

Javier Corrales: They become docile. Or in exile. Or in jail. Docile is a good phrase. In Venezuela, we don't see that. We see the repression. We see the exile. We see some groups being docile, but you do see perseverance and trying different tactics and always at the brink of cornering the regime. There is, this battle is not over and that's remarkable.

Mark Williams: Well, I also wanted to get your read on how average Venezuelans might be faring under autocratic rule. Do you have any sense of how normal, perhaps nonpolitical or political Venezuelans are actually faring?

Javier Corrales: So ordinary Venezuelans are subjected to three hellish conditions. We don't often find countries experiencing all of these three hellish conditions at the same time.
Number one, they have one of the most repressive regimes in Latin America and in the Global South at the moment with a significant degree of brutal force being applied. And citizens don't have recourse if they get into any kind of trouble, political trouble.

Number two, the economic recession of Venezuela, which started right around 2014, has continued since then. So we're about to start the second decade. And it's one of the worst recessions in the history of Latin America, comparable to the one that you see in countries experiencing civil war.
And third, a significant spread of these criminal activities. So you have to deal as a Venezuelan citizen with the high probability that at some point you're going to have to interact with a criminal actor who may be working independently or in cahoots with the state.

So to answer your question, Mark, I think ordinary Venezuelans are living in a triple hell. The one hellish thing that they do not have is civil war and a complete full crackdown.

Mark Williams: Javier, I've got to ask you about the United States.

Javier Corrales: Yes.

Mark Williams: A number of analysts, practitioners, and people in intelligence circles have raised alarms about perceived threats to American democracy given political dynamics that have happened in the country over the last, at least the last 10 years, but particularly since 2016 onward. Does your research on transitions to autocracy in Latin America have any bearing or any implications for political dynamics here in America?

Javier Corrales: Oh, absolutely. I think we are no longer living in an era where we would say that what happens in the rest of the world doesn't apply to the United States, that the United States is that exceptional of a democracy. I think the research that I and many scholars do on democratic backsliding tell us that all democracies are susceptible to democratic backsliding. Maybe not to the same degree, but certainly a significant erosion of a few very specific points about democracy.

The possibility that a ruler can come in and argue that the country needs to concentrate power on a leader and a group of decision makers because they face some kind of a crisis that demands this kind of concentration of power, number one, and number two, that some actors in the political system need to be punished for their wrongdoing. We now know that this can happen in every democracy.
And we also know that in the United States, we have a political party at the moment with a president who's campaigning precisely on this platform, that we need to concentrate power in the executive branch and especially his own team, and that he has to come in and treat the threats to the system with a very hard line approach. So, we have the offering there. It's on the menu at the moment. And we know that there are times when citizens will vote for that, will feel that's exactly what the country needs at the moment. And so a lot of this research on democratic backsliding is now applicable to the United States and advanced capitalist democracies, because we're seeing many countries like this with political parties making the same kind of offering.

Mark Williams: Thank you. Can countries where autocracy or semi autocracy have emerged can they ever escape? Can they ever recover their democracy, do you think?

Javier Corrales: Like many pathologies, the more advanced your stage is the harder it is. One of the characteristics of the global democratic recession that we're having right now is that we're seeing very few transitions to democracy. You have countries that backslide and tend to coast, tend to stay there. They may not go all the way to autocracy, but they stay at those levels of poorly performing democracies or semi authoritarian regimes. So we don't have a lot of cases of coming out of this. But, we do have some.
In my book, I tried to study two in Latin America. Those are the ones I was able to find and I think it's important to focus on them. And I hope others focus on the cases that do manage to come out of this. Because it's very important for researchers and for citizens to know, what are the right things that nations can do if they catch this disease, to continue with this metaphor from immunology.

Mark Williams: I was just going to ask you about that, what can societies or countries do citizens do to reverse this slide into autocracy?

Javier Corrales: Yes, I think it is very important for all citizens to regain an appreciation of the remarkable gift of liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is the kind of democracy that has strong checks on power–those who are elected to power, who set rules. We normally don't like this because we feel like we cannot change things. These checks prevent us from achieving the goals that we have in mind. But the creators of liberal democracy were onto something when they said, but it actually delivers on an incredible thing, which is preventing arbitrary rule. So we need to, first of all, regain a bit of an appreciation of the importance of these institutions.

This comes with a risk. It comes with a risk that many of these institutions need to be reformed. Many of these institutions themselves are problematic. That's true. But in the face of a leader who wants to take them all out and replace them with their own, you have no option than to become a defender of the institutions that are in place, or at least not granting the president full authority to redesign them at will. So that's number one.

Number two, when you enter into the opposition, don't be discouraged and abstain. Use every opportunity to participate politically. Elections are going to be a big deal. You're very likely to feel that they make no sense anymore, that the incumbent is undefeatable. That's a terrible mistake to adopt a defeatist approach. And even better, if the opposition manages to organize elections in a united front, that would be, in my opinion, the best advice to provide. It's difficult to stop the process as it is happening, but you can have an important election that can set the brakes and even eject populists from office.

We have seen now, not a lot, but enough situations in which leaders who are moving in the direction of executive aggrandizement and erosion of liberal democracy get defeated at the polls. We saw it in Brazil. We've seen it in Poland. We've seen it in Ukraine, in other countries, in the ones I have studied as in Colombia and in Ecuador. So it is possible to do it at the polls. And so elections continue to be very important in fighting these processes of autocratization.

Mark Williams: And on that note, I think we’re going to wrap things up. Javier Corrales, thank you very much for visiting us on New Frontiers. It's been a real pleasure speaking with you.

Javier Corrales: The pleasure has been mine. Thank you so much, Mark.

Mark Williams: This episode was recorded before the 2024 presidential election. Given that a majority of Americans voted again for Donald Trump despite his openly autocratic tendencies, it's possible the US may just have missed a golden opportunity to avoid a slide toward autocratic rule.

This episode of New Frontiers was produced by Margaret DeFoor and me, Mark Williams. Our theme music is by Ketsa. If you like the show, leave us a rating or review on Spotify, Amazon, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This can help others to find us too. We'll be back with another episode of New Frontiers. Thanks a lot.